Languages

Lisp

LISP, rhymes with wisp

Also Known As LISP

Citation Formats

General Reference

Computing Atlas. "Lisp." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/lisp.

APA Style

Computing Atlas. (n.d.). Lisp. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/lisp

BibTeX

@misc{computingatlas-lisp,
  author = {Computing Atlas},
  title = {Lisp},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/lisp},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Lisp, from List Processing, is a programming language designed by John McCarthy in 1958, built around the idea of representing both programs and data as nested lists, a design that made it especially suited to symbolic reasoning and, later, artificial intelligence research. It introduced ideas that later became common across many languages, including recursion as a primary tool, automatic memory management through garbage collection, and treating functions themselves as data that can be passed around and combined.

Facts

First Released

1958 1

Paradigm

Functional, symbolic 1

Significance

One of the earliest languages built for symbolic computation, and the long standing language of choice for artificial intelligence research for decades. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Functional Programming

Lisp is the first high level functional programming language.

Source Wikipedia: Functional Programming

Recursion

Source Wikipedia: Recursion (Computer Science)

Sources

1. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster, 2014

Wikipedia: Lisp (programming language)

Wikimedia FoundationLead section

Quote, Lead section

Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation.

View the Source

Wikipedia: Functional Programming

Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Functional Programming, History section

Quote, Associated With: Functional Programming, History section