Background Papers

These papers are included by permission of their authors and (where different) the copyright holders.

A classic advocacy paper:

John Hughes, Why Functional Programming Matters. In D. Turner, editor, Research Topics in Functional Programming, Addison-Wesley, 1990

Critical comparison, Scheme versus pure lazy fp (for teaching):

Philip Wadler, A critique of Abelson and Sussman or why calculating is better than scheming, SIGPLAN Notices 22(3):83-94, March 1987

A survey and a tribute to Church, who invented the lambda calculus and is thus the progenitor of functional programming. (Historical connection: Turner is one of Church's academic grandchildren):

David Turner, Church's Thesis and Functional Programming, in ed. A. Olszewski, Church's Thesis after 70 years, pp 518-544, Ontos Verlag, Berlin 2006

David Turner, Some History of Functional Programming Languages, Proceedings TFP 2012, Springer LNCS 7829:1--20