Lambda calculus is at least a million times less profound than mathematical calculus, but Lisp people get off on the term "Lambda Calculus" because the word, "calculus" makes Lisp seem profound.

Less profound than integral calculus? Maybe; not a million times less, but maybe a bit. It's still quite profound, though, since it wraps around and meets Turing machines coming from the other direction. (Turing machines are basically being an idealized machine language, while Lambda Calculus is basically an idealized high-level programming language.)

Re: part two of your claim, Lisp doesn't need to "sound" profound; it is profound. There's a difference. Lisp wasn't so much created as discovered, being only slightly more sugared than a direct translation of Lambda Calculus into ASCII.

When Lisp was first designed by McCarthy's team, it wasn't meant to be a real programming language, but rather a collection of ideas from which a real programming language could be built. However, Steve Russel read McCarthy's paper and had the insight that he could bring a Lisp interpreter into existence by implementing the "eval" function in another language, which he promptly did. This insight was something of a shock at the time, and it's largely due to that shock that Lisp stayed so close to the mathematics behind it.

For the last 50 years, programming languages have been striving for more and more powerful constructs to allow the programmer to write in shorthand — more features with less typing — and the result is a myriad of languages that look more and more like Lisp dialects. This is fundamentally because these languages are trying to give programmers the full power of Lambda Calculus, which is what Lisp essentially is.

Me, personally, I can't stand counting and balancing all the damn parentheses, so I use Perl (itself a very Lisp-informed language). But I know the power I'm missing out on, because I can't look at Lisp without drooling and getting slightly jealous.

Lambda calculus *is* a mathematical calculus. Get ye to a dictionary -- or at least to Good Math Bad Math.

D'A

Chronos: thanks for the schooling.

D'Archange: perhaps I should have said "THE Calculus." I know they are both mathematical. Good Math Bad Math -- I'll check it out.