Lisp is the programming language created by John McCarthy that was first implemented in 1958 and became famous for symbolic list processing.
McCarthy developed Lisp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while researching artificial intelligence. Its name comes from “List Processing,” reflecting the language’s central use of linked lists as both data and program structures.
Lisp introduced several influential ideas, including symbolic expressions, automatic memory management through garbage collection, and functions that can manipulate other functions. These features made it especially useful for AI research and language experimentation.
People often confuse Lisp with Scheme, Common Lisp, or Clojure. Those are separate Lisp-family languages. Lisp itself is the older family name and the language associated with McCarthy’s original work.