DevHacker Noonabout 3 hours ago
A Very Subjective History of Functional Programming
1 min read
John McCarthy built LISP because Fortran could not symbolically differentiate mathematical expressions, requiring new list structures and garbage collection for dynamic memory. Peter Landin introduced closures to handle nested variables and formalized semantics using Church lambda-calculus before Python syntax existed. Christopher Strachey defined denotational semantics while Robin Milner created type inference systems that proved compiler correctness without explicit annotations.
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