SOME LISP HISTORY AND SOME PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE IDEAS
John McCarthy, Stanford University
Berlin, 2002 June 19

I suppose I'm here because of Lisp, although I haven't been involved in the Lisp community for a very long time. Lisp is actively used, e.g. on the Deep Space 1 spacecraft and in the Orbitz airline reservation system, but I don't know any details. Fritz Kunze's Franz Inc. makes quite a good common Lisp, called Allegro Common Lisp. Some important aspects of Lisp are not available in other programming languages and systems. I don't know if they are used in the above applications. The original idea was to combine 1956 list processing as done by Newell, Simon and Shaw with ideas from John Backus's Fortran. Herbert Gelernter at IBM undertook to implement Marvin Minsky's idea for a plane geometry theorem prover, and I proposed list processing in Fortran. Gelernter and Carl Gerberich developed FLPL. In 1958 Lisp was started at M.I.T. using recursion, which was not feasible in Fortran. Lisp was intended for AI programming. Lisp was intended to be compiled at first. However, I wrote a universal Lisp function in 1959 to show that Lisp was a neater language for computability theory than Turing machines. Steve Russell pointed out that the universal function could be taken as an interpreter for pure Lisp, and hand-compiled it in IBM 704 machine language.