FP (short for functional programming) is a programming language created by John Backus to support the function-level programming paradigm. It allows building programs from a set of generally useful primitives and avoiding named variables (a style also called tacit programming or "point free"). It was heavily influenced by APL which was developed by Kenneth E. Iverson in the early 1960s. FP itself never found much use outside of academia. In the 1980s Backus created a successor language, FL, which was an internal project at IBM Research.