1.11 Notes and Further Reading

The term paradigm was coined by historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Since most programming languages no longer fit cleanly into the classical language paradigms, the concept of language purity (with respect to a particular paradigm) is pragmatically obsolete. The notion of a first-class entity is attributed to British computer scientist Christopher Strachey (Abelson and Sussman 1996, p.76, footnote 64). John McCarthy, the original designer of Lisp, received the ACM A. M. Turing Award in 1971 for contributions to artificial intelligence, including the creation of Lisp.