How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language

> McCarthy built Lisp out of parts so fundamental that it is hard to say whether he invented it or discovered it. I loved that sentence! I'm guessing epistemology or a similar field has pondered the "invented or discovered" question already, and if so, I want to read about it. > [on SICP:] Those concepts were general enough that any language could have been used What?? In chapter 4, you write your own Lisp interpreter. If they had chosen C++…

Gerald Sussman, co-inventor of Scheme and author of SICP, was my undergraduate advisor. The last several times I visited his office, he was usually with Jack Wisdom either programming or deep in thought or discussion about differential geometry and the differential geometry Scheme library they were writing. One time when he wasn't so occupied, I brought up SICP, and asked if he was aware that a lot of people think of reading the book as a sort of magical, enlightening…

Excerpt: "McCarthy explained Lisp to his readers by building it up out of only a very small collection of rules. Paul Graham later retraced McCarthy’s steps, using more readable language, in his essay “The Roots of Lisp” (http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html). Graham is able to explain Lisp using only seven primitive operators, two different notations for functions, and a half-dozen higher-level functions defined in terms of the primitive operators."

It's really weird how HN changes the title sometimes... Here it removed the "How" at the beginning, I had to re-edit it. Do you think there is an LLM involved somewhere?