John McCarthy. History of Lisp. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University. 1979.

McCarthy’s own take on the early history. It’s quite brief, but is very careful to give broad credit to the others who were involved in the practical creation of the language.

It’s also got some great vignettes on why certain features came about - for example garbage collection coming from the need to clean up intermediate structures when experimenting with symbolic differentiation. McCarthy acknowledges taking the notation for functions from Church, before admitting that he didn’t understand the rest of Calculi of lambda conversion and so wasn’t tempted to add the more general aspects!

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the story is that it was originally so divorced from actual computers. The team had defined an eval function for interpreting Lisp programs – in the process making the decision to represent the programs as lists – before realising that this could be made interactive to provide a running interpreter.

What did McCarthy think of his creation? He was conscious that it would have a lifetime:

LISP will become obsolete when someone makes a more comprehensive language that dominates LISP practically and also gives a clear mathematical semantics to a more comprehensive set of features.

Haskell has a plausible claim to have accomplished the latter but this doesn’t seem to have led domination in practice.