Lisp50: The 50th birthday of lisp at OOPSLA 2008

ABSTRACT

In October 1958, John McCarthy published one in a series of reports about his then ongoing effort for designing a new programming language that would be especially suited for achieving artificial intelligence. That report was the first one to use the name LISP for this new programming language. 50 years later, Lisp is still in use. We would like to celebrate Lisp's 50 th birthday. OOPSLA 2008 is an excellent venue for such a celebration, because object-oriented programming benefitted heavily from Lisp ideas and because OOPSLA 2008 takes place in October, exactly 50 years after the name Lisp has been used publicly for the first time. We will have talks by John McCarthy himself, and numerous other influential Lispers from the past five decades. We will also take a look at the next 50 years of Lisp.

REFERENCES

• 1: Paul Graham, Five Questions about Language Design. Dynamic Languages Wizards Series, Panel on Language Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, May 2001. Notes: http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html
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• 5: John McCarthy, Symbol Manipulating Language--Revisions of the Language. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Memo No. 4, Cambridge, MA, October 1958.
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.0 General

Additional Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.2 HISTORY OF COMPUTING

General Terms:
Languages

Keywords:
common lisp, lisp, scheme