To someone like me who's interested in compilers but doesn't have deep understanding of their workings, this is a really fascinating article! I appreciate the history, maybe should dig in to some of the linked papers ...
I skimmed this article, but it really deserves a nice bowl of cereal and a comfy chair to go with it. This looks like serious fun. More like this please!
The slides to Zadeck's keynote at the Static Single-Assignment Form Seminar, 2009, are worth reading for the history:<p><a href="http://www.cdl.uni-saarland.de/ssasem/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cdl.uni-saarland.de/ssasem/</a>
great article! It reminds me of Curien's work on categorical combinators, where the machine definition is given by the equational axioms of the model, in this case the cartesian closed categories.<p>I don't think McCarthy was informed by the lambda calculus either. I've heard his background was in functional analysis and he was motivated by symbolic differentiation when inventing lisp. I'd be interested to know this history better.