Lisp, from List Processing, is a programming language designed by John McCarthy in 1958, built around the idea of representing both programs and data as nested lists, a design that made it especially suited to symbolic reasoning and, later, artificial intelligence research. It introduced ideas that later became common across many languages, including recursion as a primary tool, automatic memory management through garbage collection, and treating functions themselves as data that can be passed around and combined.
Facts
First Released SignificanceOne of the earliest languages built for symbolic computation, and the long standing language of choice for artificial intelligence research for decades. 2 Classification
Typing Discipline Typing Discipline FAQs
Which programming language is older than Lisp?
Only Fortran is older.
Only Fortran is older, by one year. Lisp was originally specified in 1958 and is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in widespread use today.
Connections
Associated With
Lisp is the first high level functional programming language.
Source Wikipedia: Functional programming
Source Wikipedia: Recursion (Computer Science)
Follows Typing Discipline
In Field
Source The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital RevolutionWalter Isaacson
Influenced
General knowledge, not independently re-fetched: Clojure, created by Rich Hickey, is a modern Lisp dialect targeting the JVM.
General knowledge, not independently re-fetched: Common Lisp (ANSI standard, 1984) unified and standardized several earlier Lisp dialects.
General knowledge, not independently re-fetched: Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp family, used as GNU Emacs's extension and scripting language.
Source Wikipedia: Ruby (programming language)
Influenced By
Invented By
Source The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital RevolutionWalter Isaacson
Predecessor Of
Source Wikipedia: Scheme (programming language)
Sources
1. Wikidata: Lisp
- Wikidata Q132874, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)
- Wikidata Q132874 P571 (inception)
- Wikidata Q132874 P7078 (typing discipline)
View the Source2. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster, 2014
Wikipedia: Lisp (programming language)
Wikimedia FoundationLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation.
Wikipedia: Functional programming
WikipediaAssociated With: Functional Programming, History sectionQuote, Associated With: Functional Programming, History section
The first high-level functional programming language, Lisp, was developed in the late 1950s for the IBM 700/7000 series of scientific computers.
Wikipedia: Recursion (Computer Science)
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Recursion, HistoryQuote, Associated With: Recursion, History
John McCarthy took the first steps by creating the programming language LISP in 1960.
Wikipedia: Ruby (programming language)
Wikimedia FoundationInfluenced: Ruby, Semantics and philosophy sectionQuote, Influenced: Ruby, Semantics and philosophy section
According to the creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, BASIC, and Lisp.
Wikipedia: Scheme (programming language)
Wikimedia FoundationPredecessor Of: Scheme, OriginsQuote, Predecessor Of: Scheme, Origins
Scheme started in the 1970s as an attempt to understand Carl Hewitt's Actor model, for which purpose Steele and Sussman wrote a "tiny Lisp interpreter" using Maclisp and then "added mechanisms for creating actors and sending messages".
Programming Language Database (PLDB): Lisp - PLDB
Programming Language Database (PLDB)In Group: Lisp Dialects, Page textQuote, In Group: Lisp Dialects, Page text
Lisp (historically, LISP) is a family of computer programming languages
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