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I read in the book: "Masterminds of programming" , the the interview with Guido Van Rossum says:
The more fundamental property Python shares with Lisp ( not a functional language either! ) is that functionas are first-class objects...
So, Lisp is not a functional programming language?
Is Guido wrong? What is it then?
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Functional programming languages are specially designed to handle symbolic computation and list processing applications. Functional programming is based on mathematical functions. Some of the popular functional programming languages include: Lisp, Python, Erlang, Haskell, Clojure, etc.
A LISP program is a function applied to data, rather than being a sequence of procedural steps as in FORTRAN and ALGOL.
Common Lisp is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language. It supports a combination of procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming paradigms.
Pretty much every Lisp I know of can be used to program in a functional style (all you really need are first-class functions, after all!)
However, Lisps are more like multi-language toolkits: you can do functional programming, OOP, logic programming, define your own DSL for some whacky new paradigm etc.
The Lisp that is probably closest to a functional programming style is Clojure (it has lazy evaluation, discourages OOP, uses immutable data structures throughout, restricts uncontrolled mutation (via STM), has quite a lot of pure / higher order functions in the core library etc.)
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