You can do functional programming in Lisp, but even the wiki page for GOAL says "GOAL encourages an imperative programming style". Not to mention most Lisp data structures being mutable if we're talking purely functional.

I have a problem with modern notions of purely functional.

My first functional programming language was Caml Light, back in 1996. Followed by Prolog and eventually Lisp.

All alongside traditional lambda calculus and logic proofs, with ocasional references to a programming language called Mirada.

So for me, Lisp is functional programming and I don't buy into this modern notion that only Haskell is the poster child of FP.

I looks like alayne is using 'purely functional' to mean Pure + Functional, but you are using it to mean Everything is an Expression / First-class functions, etc.. The functional paradigm.

Lisp is definitely a functional language. It's just not as pure as Haskell, which is the poster child for Maximally Pure FP, if not for the functional style.

Hence why I made the reference to Miranda.

We were already doing functional programming while Haskell was still using diapers.

Well, yes. Haskell is heavily inspired by Miranda. Haskell was just managed in a way that allowed it to become very popular.

Probably more like when Mozilla ships a browser written in Rust. Even though Rust handles low-level so well, it heavily uses FP concepts.

Meanwhile, this is good news for people creating startups or otherwise being competitive. Having advanced programming languages where your competition is mired down having to churn out 10x more code, is certainly a benefit. Although not every (many?) business really comes down to technical ability.

> Probably more like when Mozilla ships a browser written in Rust.

Actually I would rather see this happening, than the continuous effort on Firefox OS.

> You mean like Crash Bandicoot, Abuse, Jak and Daxter?

Huh, TIL:

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

While Crash Bandicoot used LISP (which I wouldn't call FP, although definitions vary), it was only for a small part of the code (the AI), nowhere near all the game was written in lisp.