Lisp (historically, LISP) is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the ...

Computers need programming languages to function. That’s just a simple fact of life. However, these languages didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. They were developed by people for explicit purposes.

So we ended last episode with programming at the hardware level with things like plugboards and huge panels of switches, but what was really needed was a more versatile way to program computers - ...

Way back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a few very awesome people around MIT were working on Lisp machines. These computers were designed specifically to run Lisp as their main programming ...

Lisp is a supremely elegant programming language, but you won’t find it around much today. That’s a shame; in the 80s and 90s, all the cool kids were using Lisp machines, computers dedicated to the ...

New languages emerge to fill niches that the existing ones don’t satisfy. combined the speed of C with the rapid development cycles of interpreted languages like Python. Rust came about because ...