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. It is also an ideal language for advanced work in compilers.

Scheme is a small, simple dialect of Lisp. Common Lisp is a larger, standardized dialect of Lisp with many features. Clojure is a Lisp dialect based on Java.