I'm talking about computer science, not automatic calculation or programmable mechanical machines. I refer to the Lambda calculus of Alonzo Church, which precedes the Turing machine.
So what you mean to say is that the term "functional programming" was coined by computer science at its inception to describe what Lisp does. I quite simply don't buy it as a description of the real world.
(Slightly later) Sorry, I've just seen your
> However, leaving theoretical issues for a while, Fortran (imperative) was born in 1954, where Lisp (functional) in 1958. Thus, from this point of view, you are right
I'd also say that I'm not /completely/ hostile to this sort of thing, and I've seen some quite interesting work which used Lisp as a low-level stepping stone to something that more closely resembled what today we'd call a "real" language. But I've studied the history of early programming languages sufficiently to be able to see exactly "where McCarthy was coming from" and what he was trying to do, and while I don't deny that some interesting work has come out of the Lisp camp it was, basically a dead-end approach: in much the same way that intersting concepts came out of Modula-2 while the language itself was a dead end.
MarkMLl