Creation of Lisp

Lisp was created by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, drawing on the lambda calculus of Alonzo Church, as a notation for working with symbolic information. It introduced ideas that later became widespread, such as recursion, automatic memory management through garbage collection, and treating code as data, thanks to its distinctive syntax of nested lists in brackets. It became the favoured language of artificial intelligence research for decades. It has spawned many dialects, among them Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure, and it is the base of the scripting language of the Emacs editor. Only Fortran is older among high-level languages still widely used.

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