History. Evolution of Lisp, Guy Steele, Richard Gabriel, 1993

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

History of Lisp, from 1980 to 1993

The Evolution of Lisp By Guy L Steele Jr., Richard P Gabriel. At http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Hopl2.pdf

The Evolution of Lisp, table of contents

  • Introduction
  • Implementation Projects Chronology
  • From Lisp 1.5 to PDP-6 Lisp: 1960–1965
  • MacLisp
  • Interlisp
  • The Early 1970’s
  • The Demise of the PDP-10
  • Lisp Machines
  • IBM Lisps: Lisp360 and Lisp370
  • Scheme: 1975–1980
  • Prelude to Common Lisp: 1980–1984
  • Early Common Lisp
  • Other Stock Hardware Dialects: 1980–1984
  • Standards Development: 1984–1990

Evolution of Some Specific Language Features

  • The Treatment of NIL (and T)
  • Iteration
  • Macros
  • Numerical Facilities
  • Some Notable Failures
  • Lisp as a Language Laboratory
  • Why Lisp is Diverse

The Evolution of Lisp, and Lisp Design Issues

read it. History of Scheme and Common Lisp, and lisps before that, and, many pros and cons of lisp language design issues.

see also

Richard Gabriel, is one of the early lisper. He wrote a book, a short biography, and his company, which eventually gave us XEmacs. (the book detailed some history of XEmacs.)

the book is Patterns of Software, which i wrote a review 17 years ago.

and, oldies;

lisp history