Is Haskell a Lisp?

Question

I\'ve been reading The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming by Doets and Eijck 2004. It seems to be a well respected book, but I was struck when it claims that Haske

Answer 1

I think that it is a stretch to consider Haskell as a member of the LISP family, but I suspect the reasoning goes something like this...

When classifying programming languages, it is meaningful to divide them into two groups: those descended from FORTRAN and those that are not. In 1958, the "not FORTRAN group" pretty much meant LISP (at least, among the languages that are not extinct today). So, for a time, the programming language family tree had two main branches: the FORTRAN descendants and the LISP descendants. If those are the only two choices, then I would put Haskell into the LISP branch.

However, many commentators consider languages like ML, Prolog and APL to have arisen "out of the blue" -- introducing sufficiently distinct paradigms to merit lineages unto themselves. Haskell is clearly kin to ML.

As examples of such classifications, see the following programming language family trees:

O'Reilly's Programming Language Poster

Computer Languages Timeline at levenez.com

HOPL: an interactive Roster of Programming Languages (Haskell Entry)