Theory

Historical perspectives

Notation and ideas of differentiable functions comes from the 17th century mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. Early functions dealt with the continuous change of the values. By the 20th century, functions were generalized to map between any two sets, inputs and outputs.

Lambda calculus was invented by Alonzo Church in the 1930s. That happened actually a decade before modern electrically powered computers were created. Lambda calculus can be described as the simplest and the smallest universal Turing complete programming language.

Note

In mathematics, functions are often seen as graphs. In the Lambda calculus, functions are seen as formulas and rules instead. It is a system for manipulating functions as expressions.

LISP (LISt Processor) 1.5 was specified in 1958 by John McCarthy. It is the second oldest language after FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), both currently in active use.

In February 1991, Guido van Rossum published the codebase for Python version 0.9.0.

Hy, that is meant to operate as a transparent LISP front end to Python’s AST, was introduced at PyCon 2013 by Paul Tagliamonte.

calchylus3 module was programmed with Hy by Marko Manninen in 01/2019.