Lisp Historical Precedence

Discussions focus on the history of early programming languages, particularly how Lisp and contemporaries like Algol, BCPL, and Smalltalk pioneered features such as garbage collection, abstractions, and Lisp machines well before C and modern languages.

📉 Falling 0.4x Programming Languages
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Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#1759
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
12
2008
25
2009
51
2010
77
2011
89
2012
74
2013
118
2014
180
2015
239
2016
264
2017
269
2018
271
2019
355
2020
343
2021
332
2022
435
2023
397
2024
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2025
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2026
14

Keywords

e.g radio.net ALGOL APL USSR JOVIAL MATIC GLS db.cs MIT lisp scheme algol language pl languages apl scoped dialects smalltalk

Sample Comments

no_identd Jan 15, 2019 View on HN

You might want to go learn a bit of history:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

dalke Aug 19, 2016 View on HN

IBM 704 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)#Hi...

sc68cal Mar 24, 2025 View on HN

With BCPLhttps://web.archive.org/web/20250130134200/https://www.bell-...See also this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462794

signa11 Apr 15, 2023 View on HN

you forgot algol (or algol60 if you prefer), which begat (almost) all...

tralarpa Mar 11, 2021 View on HN

Was it different for the designers of ALGOL/SIMULA/Pascal?

lispm Apr 15, 2013 View on HN

That sounds like a new version.McCarthy says in his 1960 paper about Lisp just in the first paragraph of the introduction:> A programming system called LISP (for LISt Processor) has been developed for the IBM 704 computer by the Artificial Intelligence group at M.I.T. The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine could be instructed to handle declarative as well as imperative sentences and could exhibit ``common sens

pjmlp Jan 22, 2014 View on HN

Lisp and Smalltalk were the first ones.

walshemj Feb 25, 2018 View on HN

I though ALGOL was a 60's language

yawaramin Jan 29, 2020 View on HN

@nineteen999: that all happened a long time ago. Study your history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

pjmlp Nov 22, 2016 View on HN

Yes, it was called Lisp Machines,Mesa/Cedar and Smalltalk.