the.com/lisp
a language so old it predates the bug and the keyboard alike.
means To pronounce the sounds 's' and 'z' as 'th', or the speech impediment that produces this softened, slushy sibilance.
from From Old English 'wlispian,' to speak with a stammer or lisp, related to a small family of Germanic words for stuttering and faltering speech (compare Old High German 'lispen'). The word is widely thought to be imitative — its own soft, slippery sound mimicking the very mispronunciation it names. The 'w' fell silent and dropped away over the centuries, leaving the gentler 'lisp' we say today.
- born
- 1958, second-oldest high-level language after Fortran
- parentheses
- code drowns in them, lovingly
- self-aware
- its code and data share the same structure
- garbage collection
- pioneered automatic memory cleanup decades early
- AI roots
- powered early artificial intelligence research
common lisp — programming language standardized in 1994, used in ai systems and symbolics machines
scheme — lisp dialect created at mit in 1975, used in structure and interpretation of computer programs textbook
emacs lisp — lisp variant embedded in gnu emacs text editor since 1985, extends editor functionality