> Lisp has an abstract beauty in that it is a homoiconic language thought up as an intellectual exercise from a small number of basic rules and simple syntax.

> Lisp has an abstract beauty in that it is a homoiconic language thought up as an intellectual exercise from a small number of basic rules and simple syntax. That's the idealistic view. Also LISP was developed over some years, based on earlier languages for list processing (IPL, ...) and similar. The paper 'RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS OF SYMBOLIC EXPRESSIONS AND THEIR COMPUTATION BY MACHINE' was a presentation to a specific (more scientific) audience, while there were earlier and at the same time already 'real' language manuals published, which were concerned with less 'abstract' topics. See for example: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/LISP_Prog_Man-Mar_1959.pdf http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/LISP_P...