Comment by sedachv

> for a long time certain Lisp/Scheme folks would gatekeep about how a language wasn’t a Real Functional Language if it wasn’t homoiconic and didn’t have fancy macros

This never happened. You are confusing functional with the 2000s "X is a good enough Lisp" controversy, which had nothing to do with functional programming.

> “Functional” means “functions are first-class citizens in the language”

No, the word function has a clearly defined meaning. I don't know where you get your strange ideas from - you need to look at original sources. The word "functional" did not become part of the jargon until the 1990s. Even into the 1980s most people referred to this paradigm as "applicative" (as in procedure application), which is a lot more appropriate. The big problem with the Lisp community is that early on, when everyone used the words "procedures" or "subroutines," they decided to start calling them "functions," even though they could have side effects. This is probably the reason why people started trying to appropriate "functional" as an adjective from the ML and Haskell communities into their own languages. A lot of people assume that if you can write a for loop as a map, it makes it "functional." What you end up with is a bunch of inappropriate cargo-culting by people who do not understand the basics of functional programming.