Lisp


Lisp (LISt Processing language) was first developed in the late 1950s at the MIT for research in artificial intelligence. Dozens of Lisp implementations have been built over the years, each with its own idiosyncrasies: Lisp is a functional language in which an operation (function name) is written, followed by its arguments, inside parentheses, e.g. (+ x 3). There is no “main program:” the programmer can call any function from the input prompt. When you learn LISP, you will grasp the essential nature of the language better if you first learn to write programs using only function composition and recursion. This approach is harder, of course, because it requires you to master a new way of thinking.