The talk that wasn't

BRANK

How do you condense a 30 minute talk in 5 minutes? Should you even try? These are the questions I struggled with when someone nudged me to register for the lightning talks. My talk was 30 minute long because I was to jump in if a last-minute incident would prevent someone to get on stage. Call me the backup speaker, if you will. In organizing Heart of Clojure, Arne Brasseur and Martin Klepsch had prepared for every eventuality. Luckily, the event was incident free, and I was relieved of duty. But that someone was right: a lightning talk was the only redeeming option I had before calling it quits.TL;DR Lisp is not based on the Lambda CalculusMy topic was Lisp in the broader context of science. The recursive functions mentioned in McCarthy's seminal paper, Recursive functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I refer to the class of functions studied in computability theory. They are interesting because with just three initial functions (successor, constant …