Functional programming history

Question

Lambda calculus provides a theoretical framework for describing functions and their evaluation. Though it is a mathematical abstraction rather than a programming language, it forms the basis of almost all functional programming languages today.

Combinatory logic is an equivalent theoretical foundation, developed by Moses Schönfinkel and Haskell Curry. It was originally developed to achieve a clearer approach to the foundations of mathematics.[11] Combinatory logic is commonly perceived as more abstract than lambda calculus and preceded it in invention.

An early functional-flavored language was LISP, developed by John McCarthy while at MIT for the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers in the late 1950s.[12] LISP introduced many features now found in functional languages, though LISP is technically a multi-paradigm language. Scheme and Dylan were later attempts to simplify and improve LISP.

Information Processing Language (IPL) is sometimes cited as the first computer-based functional programming language. It is an assembly-style language for manipulating lists of symbols. It does have a notion of "generator", which amounts to a function accepting a function as an argument, and, since it is an assembly-level language, code can be used as data, so IPL can be regarded as having higher-order functions. However, it relies heavily on mutating list structure and similar imperative features.

Kenneth E. Iverson developed the APL programming language in the early 1960s, described in his 1962 book A Programming Language (ISBN 978047143014. APL was the primary influence on John Backus's FP programming language. In the early 1990s, Iverson and Roger Hui created a successor to APL, the J programming language. In the mid 1990s, Arthur Whitney, who had previously worked with Iverson, created the K programming language, which is used commercially in financial industries.

John Backus presented the FP programming language in his 1977 Turing Award lecture Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and its Algebra of Programs. He defines functional programs as being built up in a hierarchical way by means of "combining forms" that allow an "algebra of programs"; in modern language, this means that functional programs follow the principle of compositionality. Backus's paper popularized research into functional programming, though it emphasized function-level programming rather than the lambda-calculus style which has come to be associated with functional programming.

In the 1970s the ML programming language was created by Robin Milner at the University of Edinburgh, and David Turner developed initially the language SASL at the University of St. Andrews and later the language Miranda at the University of Kent. ML eventually developed into several dialects, the most common of which are now Objective Caml and Standard ML. The Haskell programming language was released in the late 1980s in an attempt to gather together many ideas in functional programming research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming