^McCarthy, John. History of Lisp(PDF). Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University. 12 February 1979 [2021-09-23]. （原始内容(PDF)存档于2020-11-07）. There were two motivations for developing a language for the IBM 704. First, IBM was generously establishing a New England Computation Center at M.I.T. …… Second, IBM was undertaking to develop a program for proving theorems in plane geometry (based on an idea of Marvin Minsky’s), ……. …… In connection with IBM’s plane geometry project, Nathaniel Rochester and Herbert Gelernter（英语：Herbert Gelernter） (on the advice of McCarthy) decided to implement a list processing language within FORTRAN, ……. This work was undertaken by Herbert Gelernter and Carl Gerberich at IBM and led to FLPL, standing for FORTRAN List Processing Language. …… I spent the summer of 1958 at the IBM Information Research Department at the invitation of Nathaniel Rochester and chose differentiating algebraic expressions as a sample problem. It led to the following innovations beyond FLPL: a. Writing recursive function definitions using conditional expressions. …… b. The maplist function that forms a list of applications of a functional argument to the elements of a list. …… c. To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and it seemed natural to use the λ-notation of Church (1941). I didn’t understand the rest of his book, so I wasn’t tempted to try to implement his more general mechanism for defining functions. Church used higher order functionals instead of using conditional expressions. Conditional expressions are much more readily implemented on computers. d. The recursive definition of differentiation made no provision for erasure of abandoned list structure. …… The implementation of LISP began in Fall 1958. …… The programs to be hand-compiled were written in an informal notation called M-expressions（英语：M-expression） intended to resemble FORTRAN as much as possible.
^John McCarthy. History of Lisp(PDF). Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University. 12 February 1979 [2021-09-23]. （原始内容存档(PDF)于2020-11-07）. To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and it seemed natural to use the λ-notation of Church (1941). I didn’t understand the rest of his book, so I wasn’t tempted to try to implement his more general mechanism for defining functions. Church used higher order functionals instead of using conditional expressions. Conditional expressions are much more readily implemented on computers. David Turner（英语：David Turner (computer scientist)）. Some History of Functional Programming Languages(PDF). [2021-10-25]. （原始内容(PDF)存档于2020-04-15）. LISP was not based on the lambda calculus, despite using the word “LAMBDA” to denote functions. At the time he invented LISP, McCarthy was aware of (Church 1941) but had not studied it. The theoretical model behind LISP was Kleene’s theory of first order recursive functions. (McCarthy made these statements, or very similar ones, in a contribution from the floor at the 1982 ACM symposium on LISP and functional programming in Pittsburgh. No written version of this exists, as far as know.)
^John McCarthy. Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I.(PDF). Communications of the ACM (ACM New York, NY, USA). 1960, 3 (4): 184–195 [2021-02-24]. doi:10.1145/367177.367199. （原始内容(PDF)存档于2021-02-19）. John McCarthy, Paul W. Abrahams, Daniel J. Edwards, Timothy P. Hart, Michael I. Levin. LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual(PDF) 2nd. MIT Press. 1985 [1962] [2021-09-23]. ISBN 0-262-13011-4. （原始内容(PDF)存档于2021-03-02）. A function can be simply a name. In this case its meaning must be previously understood. A function may be defined by using the lambda notation and establishing a correspondence between the arguments and the variables used in a form. If the function is recursive, it must be given a name by using a label. …… When a symbol stands for a function, the situation is similar to that in which a symbol stands for an argument. When a function is recursive, it must be given a name. This is done by means of the form LABEL, which pairs the name with the function definition on the a-list. The name is then bound to the function definition, just as a variable is bound to its value. In actual practice, LABEL is seldom used. It is usually more convenient to attach the name to the definition in a uniform manner. This is done by putting on the property list of the name, the symbol EXPR followed by the function definition. The pseudo-function define used at the beginning of this section accomplishes this. When apply interprets a function represented by an atomic symbol, it searches the p-list of the atomic symbol before searching the current a-list. Thus a define will override a LABEL.
^The memoir of Herbert A. Simon (1991), Models of My Life pp.189-190 ISBN0-465-04640-1 claims that he, Al Newell, and Cliff Shaw are "...commonly adjudged to be the parents of [the] artificial intelligence [field]," for writing Logic Theorist, a program that proved theorems from Principia Mathematica automatically. To accomplish this, they had to invent a language and a paradigm that, viewed retrospectively, embeds functional programming.
^R.M. Burstall. Design considerations for a functional programming language. Invited paper, Proc. Infotech State of the Art Conf. "The Software Revolution", Copenhagen, 45–57 (1977)
