Just this week while going through the book _Ideas That Changed the World_ I read the original paper on LISP[1]. I have to say this magazine article reads a bit

Just this week while going through the book _Ideas That Changed the World_ I read the original paper on LISP[1]. I have to say this magazine article reads a bit cleaner. But that's kind of the fun of the book -- learning to decode the excited yet formal language of computational innovation over time. The book traces out what are effectively conversations across decades (or centuries if you include Aristotle). So when you see McCarthy name drop Church's lambda calculus, you know how it ties into a conversation about Hilbert's decidability problem, and that self-reference ("recursion") is a fundamental tool. And from the perspective of now, you see that this is the first encounter with automatic garbage collection, describing a simple mark and sweep algo. The BYTE magazine covers a more advanced garbage collector, Lambdino, which assumes a massive amount of familiarity with LISP and internals than the previous article comparing LISP and LOGO. [1]: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf