David Graunke on Combinator Compilers and Graph Reduction Machines

Here's the 1989 paper by Paul Hudak: Conception, evolution, and application of functional programming languages:

... as the number of different kinds of machines increased, the need arose for a common language with which to program all of them. Thus from primitive assembly languages (which were at least a step up from raw machine code) there grew a plethora of high-level programming languages, beginning with FORTRAN in the 1950s.  ... Debates over which language or family of languages is best will undoubtedly persist for as long as computers need programmers.

See also Brian Kernighan on How To Succeed in Language Design Without Really Trying and Philip Wadler's Essence of Functional Programming ... also Patrick Cousot & Radhia Cousot - Abstract interpretation: a unified lattice model for static analysis of programs by construction or approximation of fixpoints. and Ken Thompson talking about TMG in VCF East 2023.

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