[somewhereoutth]

I would have thought that the Lambda Calculus has a better claim to be 'God's Own Programming Language'.

Apparently McCarthy was aware of, but had not studied, the LC. One quote from the article stuck out:

"McCarthy invented an alternative, the “true” conditional expression, which returns sub-expression A if the supplied test succeeds and sub-expression B if the supplied test fails and which also only evaluates the sub-expression that actually gets returned."

this is how 'true' and 'false' are encoded in the LC, (\x \y x) and (\x \y y) respectively, and the final sentence indicates lazy evaluation.

The early (wrong) choice of dynamic vs static (lexicographical) binding, since corrected, suggest the language was far from 'handed down on stone'.

Homoiconicity is very nice, though I suspect that the macros it has enabled are often perhaps too powerful a tool.