John McCarthy created Lisp at MIT in 1958 for artificial intelligence research.
The name comes from “LISt Processor,” reflecting the language’s original strength in manipulating symbolic lists. McCarthy designed Lisp around a small set of elegant ideas, including symbolic expressions, recursive functions, and code that could be treated as data. These features made it especially useful for programs that handled language, reasoning, and other non-numeric information.
Lisp became closely associated with early AI laboratories and influenced generations of researchers. Its dialects included Maclisp, Scheme, and Common Lisp, while specialized AI systems often used Lisp machines designed for symbolic computation.
Lisp is sometimes confused with Prolog because both were important AI languages. Prolog, however, was developed later and uses a different logic-programming approach. Lisp remains historically important even though modern AI work is dominated by languages such as Python.