Functional programming: Difference between revisions

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Church later developed a weaker system, the [[simply typed lambda calculus]], which extended the lambda calculus by assigning a [[data type]] to all terms.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Church |author-link=Alonzo Church |first1=A. |year=1940 |title=A Formulation of the Simple Theory of Types |journal=Journal of Symbolic Logic |volume=5 |issue=2 |pages=56–68 |doi=10.2307/2266170 |jstor=2266170| s2cid=15889861}}</ref> This forms the basis for statically typed functional programming.

The first [[High-level programming language|high-level]] functional programming language, [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]], was developed in the late 1950s for the [[IBM 700/7000 series#Scientific Architecture|IBM 700/7000 series]] of scientific computers by [[John McCarthy (computer scientist)|John McCarthy]] while at [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT).<ref>{{cite conferencebook |first=John |last=McCarthy |author-link=John McCarthy (computer scientist) |title=The first ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of Lispprogramming languages - HOPL-1 |journalchapter=History of Programming LanguagesLISP |pages=173–185 |date=June 1978 |url=http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf|doi=10.1145/800025.808387 |place=Los Angeles, CA}}</ref> Lisp functions were defined using Church's lambda notation, extended with a label construct to allow [[Recursion (computer science)|recursive]] functions.<ref>{{cite journal|author=John McCarthy|author-link=John McCarthy (computer scientist)|title=Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I.|journal=Communications of the ACM|volume=3|issue=4|year=1960|pages=184–195|url=http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/recursive/recursive.pdf|publisher=ACM New York, NY, US|doi=10.1145/367177.367199|s2cid=1489409}}</ref> Lisp first introduced many paradigmatic features of functional programming, though early Lisps were [[Programming paradigm#Multi-paradigm|multi-paradigm languages]], and incorporated support for numerous programming styles as new paradigms evolved. Later dialects, such as [[Scheme (programming language)|Scheme]] and [[Clojure]], and offshoots such as [[Dylan (programming language)|Dylan]] and [[Julia (programming language)|Julia]], sought to simplify and rationalise Lisp around a cleanly functional core, while [[Common Lisp]] was designed to preserve and update the paradigmatic features of the numerous older dialects it replaced.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Guy L. Steele |author2=Richard P. Gabriel |title=History of programming languages---II |chapter=The evolution of Lisp |pages= 233–330 |date=February 1996 |url=http://dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf |doi= 10.1145/234286.1057818 |isbn=978-0-201-89502-5 |s2cid=47047140}}</ref>

[[Information Processing Language]] (IPL), 1956, is sometimes cited as the first computer-based functional programming language.<ref>The memoir of [[Herbert A. Simon]] (1991), ''Models of My Life'' pp.189-190 {{ISBN|0-465-04640-1}} claims that he, Al Newell, and Cliff Shaw are "...commonly adjudged to be the parents of [the] artificial intelligence [field]," for writing [[Logic Theorist]], a program that proved theorems from ''[[Principia Mathematica]]'' automatically. To accomplish this, they had to invent a language and a paradigm that, viewed retrospectively, embeds functional programming.</ref> It is an [[assembly language|assembly-style language]] for manipulating lists of symbols. It does have a notion of ''generator'', which amounts to a function that accepts a function as an argument, and, since it is a [[Low-level programming language|low-level programming language]], code can be data, so IPL can be regarded as having higher-order functions. However, it relies heavily on the mutating list structure and similar imperative features.