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The Genius of Lisp
Journey through the fascinating story of How it came about and why it was designed the way it was. Meet the geniuses involved in its creation, including Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and the father of Lisp and artificial intelligence, John McCarthy. Lisp has informed the design of most programming languages in use today, and to learn how Lisp was constructed is to learn what programming is all about.
Explore the mathematical foundations of the language and dive deeply into its earliest implementation. Discover the characteristics of and differences between modern Lisps, how to retro-compute like it’s the 1970's (and you’re a student at MIT), and why Emacs was forked. Get a solid understanding of how this language
was critical to early artificial intelligence work, from ELIZA (the ChatGPT of its day) to Expert Systems for medical diagnosis. While Lisp is one of the earliest programming languages, it is still in active use today (ever used EMACS?)
Build Lisp yourself, writing its five key functions -- car, cdr, cons, equal, and atom -- and its minimalistic interpreter with a few lines of JavaScript, to see the simplicity and beauty of its construction, and in doing so, discover for yourself the genius of Lisp.
Foreword by Common Lisp creator Richard. P. Gabriel
Explore the mathematical foundations of the language and dive deeply into its earliest implementation. Discover the characteristics of and differences between modern Lisps, how to retro-compute like it’s the 1970's (and you’re a student at MIT), and why Emacs was forked. Get a solid understanding of how this language
was critical to early artificial intelligence work, from ELIZA (the ChatGPT of its day) to Expert Systems for medical diagnosis. While Lisp is one of the earliest programming languages, it is still in active use today (ever used EMACS?)
Build Lisp yourself, writing its five key functions -- car, cdr, cons, equal, and atom -- and its minimalistic interpreter with a few lines of JavaScript, to see the simplicity and beauty of its construction, and in doing so, discover for yourself the genius of Lisp.
Foreword by Common Lisp creator Richard. P. Gabriel
- GenresProgramming
289 pages, Paperback
Published February 17, 2026
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