FP (programming language)

FP is a programming language created by John Backus to support what he called function-level programming, a style that builds programs by combining a small set of general purpose primitive functions rather than using named variables, an approach also known as tacit or point-free programming. Backus introduced FP in his 1977 Turing Award lecture, published as the paper Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style, which argued for a functional alternative to the variable-assignment style of mainstream languages of the time and sparked wider academic interest in functional programming. FP was heavily influenced by Kenneth E. Iverson's APL and in turn influenced later languages including FL, Haskell and Joy. FP saw little use outside academic research, and in the 1980s Backus developed a successor language, FL, as an internal project at IBM Research.