I came across a couple of blog posts about various languages recently, and the common thread seemed to be features that originated in LISP. Lamba expression, new(ish) in C# would be one of those things. Now LISP has never really taken off. Franz Lisp's Allegro Common Lisp has done solid business down through the years, but I dont think anybody ever got a Lamborghini or an IPO out of LISP (maybe in the days of the LISPmachines, but who knows).
It seems to remain in the Influential category. I like to think of the ML language family as being LISP derived DSLs which just happened to mature into general purpose programming languages. Apple's Dylan started out as a Scheme dialect, and Python is very definitely a re-syntaxed homage to Lisp, and Prolog's lists are very definitely a slightly embarrassed rip-off of Lisps, er, lists.
Now not being a proper computer scientist I never actually studied Lisp in any detail but all the proper computer students always seemed to be blown away by it. It is remarkable that it originated back around the same time as Cobol and Fortran and yet it stays completely futuristic, the language whose time is yet to come -- Lisp.net anyone?
A common-sense approach to Big Data
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