Lisp History

Lisp has a long and interesting history, and many Lisp hackers are only vaguely familiar with the subject. Without a working knowledge of Lisp's history however the user will fail to understand much of the rationale (or lack thereof) behind modern Lisp implementations. This page attempts to provide some short historical background on Lisp, with particular emphasis on how the more popular open source Lisps came into being. It is not intended to become a comprehensive history of Lisp, but instead as a starting point in CLiki from which other sources can be found. There is a lot of Lisp history scattered about the web, but it's not well centralized at the moment. This page is thus intended as a good place from which to start browsing.

Lisp began as a language development project of John McCarthy. He has documented its earliest history in his papers "LISP---NOTES ON ITS PAST AND FUTURE---1980" and "History of Lisp". These two papers were composed by McCarthy working from his own memory. However he has noted that Herbert Stoyan's review is probably more accurate. For other references there is also the excellent "Evolution of Lisp" by Gabriel and Steele which covers the 'golden age' of Lisp development, and Pitman and Miller's "Brief History of Lisp". The old C.L.L FAQ also has a timeline through 1992. See also the ALU page on the history of Lisp.

CMUCL comes to us from Spice Lisp, a Lisp implementation at Carnegie-Mellon University on the CMU-designed PERQ workstation. Hemlock of course also descends from the editor of the same name implemented in Spice Lisp. Spice Lisp was notable for being continually updated in step with the developing Common Lisp standard through the 1980s. At some point it was recognized that it had become a Common Lisp and was renamed to its present moniker. SBCL is a recent fork from CMUCL.

GCL and ECL have roots in the first 'outsider' Common Lisp, Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) implemented by Taiichi Yuasa and Masami Hagami based on their reading of the CLtL1. That implementation pointed out a lot of defects in the Common Lisp specification which had been either assumed or unnoticed by close community effects among the standardizers. KCL gave birth to the KCL Family, in particular Austin Kyoto Common Lisp (AKCL), developed from KCL by William Schelter at the University of Texas, Austin. His aim was to provide a Lisp implementation which would run Maxima, the descendent of the MIT MACSYMA symbolic algebra system. Schelter later released AKCL as GCL under the GPL. (What about ECL?)

OpenMCL history? CLISP history?

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