The Evolution of Lisp

Synopsis

Lisp is the world’s greatest programming language—or so its proponents think. The

structure of Lisp makes it easy to extend the language or even to implement entirely new

dialects without starting from scratch. Overall, the evolution of Lisp has been guided

more by institutional rivalry, one-upsmanship, and the glee born of technical cleverness

that is characteristic of the “hacker culture” than by sober assessments of technical

requirements. Nevertheless this process has eventually produced both an industrial-

strength programming language, messy but powerful, and a technically pure dialect,

small but powerful, that is suitable for use by programming-language theoreticians.