Lisp

Lisp is a programming language originally created by John McCarthy in 1958. Despite its age, it is still a popular choice for modern programmers. Lisp has proven itself flexible enough to evolve to meet the needs of modern programmers. Modern implementations often come "batteries-included", meaning that the programmer has access to powerful libraries for databases, regular expressions, networking, and more.

Lisp comes in different dialects, which are divided into different implementations. Three important dialects are Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, and Scheme.

Dialects

Common Lisp

Common Lisp was designed by Scott Fahlman, Richard P. Gabriel, David Moon, Guy L. Steele, and Dan Weinreb, and is described in CLTL2, as well as the Common Lisp Hyperspec.

Popular implementations include Steel Bank Common Lisp, GNU Clisp, ClozureCL, and ECL.

Emacs Lisp

Emacs Lisp is used to program and extend Emacs. Programmers who swear by Emacs should learn to use Emacs Lisp.

Scheme

Scheme, created by Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, is the dialect used in SICP.

Three of the most popular implementations are Chicken, GNU Guile, and Racket all of which include a well-designed C API, and FFI.

Niche Lisps

System scripting

• newLISP
• scsh
• LUSH

CUDA & OpenCL

• Harlan