The Insider News

The Endeavour[^]:

Toward the end of his presentation Don’t fear the Monad, Brian Beckman makes an interesting observation. He says that early in the history of programming, languages split into two categories: those that start from the machine and add layers of abstraction, and those that start from mathematics and work their way down to the machine. These two branches are roughly the descendents of Fortran and Lisp respectively. Or more theoretically, these are descendents of the Turing machine and the lambda calculus.