History of Lisp
Lisp was invented in the late 1950's and early 1960's at M.I.T. by John McCarthy. Lisp is based in part on the Lambda Calculus, a mathematical formalism developed by Alonzo Church (1903-1995).
Lisp is the second-oldest language still in widespread use (the oldest is Fortran).
Lisp is especially used for work in Artificial Intelligence.
Scheme is a clean, simple dialect of Lisp that is good for introductory CS courses. We will use implementations of Scheme called DrScheme and MacGambit.
Common Lisp is a larger, standardized dialect of Lisp with many features.