Simon Peyton Jones

Well, I did.

And I think it's probably a bad idea.

But back in 19... When was Bacchus' Turing Award lecture?

I think it was 1978 or thereabout.

What was it called?

Firstly, he, the designer of Fortran, a quintessentially imperative language, the designer of Fortran was saying, guys, we should do functional programming.

That was what the talk was about.

And he introduced a language called FP for functional programming.

It was a very particular, somewhat idiosyncratic functional programming language, but there it was.

So that was rather amazing, right?

This was 1977.

He was saying, guys, give up on imperative programming.

Just do functional programming.

Here's how you do it.

But he also said in the same lecture that,

we might imagine designing new hardware to execute this new kind of language.

So if you like, we got Turing machines, they give rise to register machines and microprocessors and so forth.

Maybe Lambda calculus, perhaps if we designed a machine from the ground up to do Lambda calculus, it would look different.

So that was of course very exciting.

And similar kind of thinking led to an actual commercial machine called a Lisp machine.