History of the Scheme programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:45, 5 November 2017

Revision as of 11:44, 26 January 2018

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25 years later, in 1998, Sussman and Steele reflected that the minimalism of Scheme was not a conscious design goal, but rather the unintended outcome of the design process. "We were actually trying to build something complicated and discovered, serendipitously, that we had accidentally designed something that met all our goals but was much simpler than we had intended... we realized that the lambda calculus—a small, simple formalism—could serve as the core of a powerful and expressive programming language." <ref name="revisited"/>

On the other hand, Hewitt remained critical of the lambda calculus as a foundation for computation writing "The actual situation is that the λ-calculus is capable of expressing some kinds of sequential and parallel control structures but, in general, not the concurrency expressed in the Actor model. On the other hand, the Actor model is capable of expressing everything in the λ-calculus and more." He has also been critical of aspects of Scheme that derive from the lambda calculus such as reliance on continuation functions and the lack of exceptions.<ref>Carl Hewitt [httphttps://arxiv.org/abs/0907.3330 ActorScriptTM: Industrial strength integration of local and nonlocal concurrency for Client-cloud Computing] ArXiv 0907.3330</ref>

==The Lambda Papers==