The programming language associated with John McCarthy's 1958 design and early garbage collection is Lisp.
McCarthy developed Lisp at MIT as a language for symbolic computation and artificial intelligence research. Its name comes from “LISt Processor,” reflecting the central role of linked lists in its data model. The language was first described in a 1958 paper and implemented soon afterward by Steve Russell on an IBM 704.
Lisp introduced several influential ideas, including treating code and data in closely related ways, recursive programming, and automatic storage reclamation. Garbage collection was developed for early Lisp systems because programs created many temporary list structures.
Lisp is a language family rather than one single modern implementation. Common descendants and dialects include Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, and Emacs Lisp. Its history is sometimes confused with that of functional programming generally, but Lisp predates many later functional languages.