John McCarthy

Designer of lisp at MIT in 1958, working on the IBM 704, and the person who gave AI research a notation for symbolic computation. His eval was written as mathematics — a definition of the language in itself — and Steve Russell turned it into an interpreter by hand-compiling it, which McCarthy had not planned for.

The reason he sits in this wiki rather than only in a history: that accident is the origin of the read-eval-print loop, of the self-hosting compiler, and of the idea that a language’s definition and its implementation can be the same artefact. common-lisp, scheme and clojure all inherit it.

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lisp · common-lisp · scheme · clojure · paul-graham