LISP - notes on its past and future

Authors:
John McCarthy
Affiliations:
-
Venue:
LFP '80 Proceedings of the 1980 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming
Year:
1980

Citing 6
Cited 2

Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I

Communications of the ACM
Recursive programs as functions in a first order theory

Proceedings of the International Conference on Mathematical Studies of Information Processing
History of LISP

ACM SIGPLAN Notices - Special issue: History of programming languages conference
A practical formal semantic definition and verification system for typed lisp.

A practical formal semantic definition and verification system for typed lisp.
LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual

LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual
Lisp machine manual

Lisp machine manual

The evolution of Lisp

HOPL-II The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages
The evolution of Lisp

History of programming languages---II

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

LISP has survived for 21 years because it is an approximate local optimum in the space of programming languages. However, it has accumulated some barnacles that should be scraped off, and some long-standing opportunities for improvement have been neglected. It would benefit from some co-operative maintenance especially in creating and maintaining program libraries. Computer checked proofs of program correctness are now possible for pure LISP and some extensions, but more theory and some smoothing of the language itself are required before we can take full advantage of LISP's mathematical basis.