A year after Fortran, John McCarthy designed a language built on entirely different instincts. Lisp treated computation as the evaluation of expressions over lists, and from that one idea came a remarkable number of concepts the rest of the field would take decades to adopt.
The idea
Programs and data are the same kind of thing, lists, evaluated recursively. From that single choice flow recursion, symbolic manipulation, and the need for automatic memory management.
McCarthy’s language
John McCarthy began developing Lisp in 1958 at MIT. It is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use, after Fortran, which is its own kind of testament given how strange it looked at the time.
What it pioneered
Lisp introduced or popularized a startling list of ideas: recursion, the list as a universal data structure, conditionals, higher-order functions, the read-eval-print loop, and automatic memory management. Garbage collection, the automatic freeing of memory no longer in use, was built for Lisp before 1962, solving a problem that Fortran’s simpler model never had.
Functional and AI
Lisp quickly became the favored language of artificial intelligence research, and it is the root of the functional tradition described in programming paradigms. Its evaluation model is close kin to Church’s lambda calculus, the same theory that sits under the limits of computation.
Related Notes
- Fortran and the High-Level Language, its contemporary opposite
- Lambda Calculus, the theory Lisp echoes
- Programming Paradigms, where functional programming fits
- History and Genealogy of Languages, the family tree
- History of Computing, the section index
Sources
- “Lisp (programming language),” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29 . Supports Lisp’s creation by John McCarthy in 1958 at MIT, its standing as the second-oldest high-level language still in common use after Fortran, its pioneering of recursion, conditionals, higher-order functions, the read-eval-print loop, and automatic memory management (garbage collection before 1962), and its association with artificial intelligence.