Classic programming terminology preservation. - Keep Sociology out of the Sciences - Share experiences and techniques around preservation of original programming terminology.

[Polyarmory]

Didn't McCarthy explicitly say he based Lisp on the lambda calculus but with some practical concessions? I'll be fine with conceding Scheme or other following works might better achieve that goal.

He borrowed some terminology and structure from Lambda Calculus, but I would not consider LISP to be an extension/constraint on lambda calculus. When reading his retrospective notes on LISP from 1979, he barely even mentions lambda calculus, but does talk about "Pure LISP" as equivalent to the Turing Machine as a general model of computation.

So the answer is not a clean "yes" or "no" in my opinion. McCarthy (and the others who helped! It was not a solitary endeavor.) were definitely aware of the lambda calculus, and it may have shaped the way they thought about things to some extent, but LISP does not directly use lambda calculus as a foundation.

ETA: A detail I only just realized I didn't mention: In his paper from 1960, which can be considered the "birth" of LISP, he's explicit about borrowing the notation of functions from Church.

Spoiler: Excerpt

For what it's worth, I find McCarthy to be much more readable than most academic writing, so I can recommend actually reading the original paper.

 

[WielkiWapiesz2137]

LISP is definitely based on lambda calculus. MCarthy mentions it here not mentioning the fact that early lisp whitepapers such as this one reference link to church whitepaper on lambda calculus

 

[Belisarius Cawl]

Hm. I'm not a purist. I'm a big fan of one of Murphy's laws of combat borrowed into programming "if it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid" (though maybe JS and PHP for example take that principle too far). I just wanted to know for historical purposes. What do you guys think about adding things like for loops to FP languages? I have to side with famous programmer Adolf Hitler on this one: