Also known as: Lisp
LISP (LISt Processor), created by John McCarthy in 1958, is one of the oldest high-level languages.1 It treats code and data as the same kind of list, pioneered the functional style, and became the language of early artificial-intelligence research.
History
LISP took a path entirely different from its contemporaries FORTRAN and COBOL. Programs are written as parenthesised lists, and crucially the code is itself a list — so a LISP program can read, build, and transform other LISP programs as ordinary data. From that idea came macros, the functional style, automatic garbage collection (which LISP pioneered), and the interactive read-eval-print loop. It became the working language of early AI labs and seeded ideas that mainstream languages adopted only decades later.
Legacy and use today
LISP is dynamically typed (see static vs dynamic typing), runs interpreted or compiled depending on the dialect, and survives in families like Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure.2 Its honest drawbacks are real: the parenthesis-heavy syntax is an acquired taste, and its mainstream use is niche today. But its influence is enormous — first-class functions, garbage collection, and treating code as data have all flowed into modern languages such as Python and JavaScript, making LISP one of the most quietly influential designs in computing.
Sources
-
Lisp (programming language) — Wikipedia, for history, the 1958 origin, and the code-as-data design. ↩
-
Common Lisp — the Common Lisp community hub, a major surviving dialect with documentation and implementations. ↩