Reposting my now very old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502434 : > Herbert Stoyan's historical w

Reposting my now very old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502434 : > Herbert Stoyan's historical work on early Lisp http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2010/07/29/185/ http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2010/07/29/185/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050617031004/http://www8.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/html/lisp-enter.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050617031004/http://www8.infor... is probably worth reading if one is seriously interested. (I haven't read much of it myself yet.) McCarthy praised Stoyan's work as better than his own 1979 HOPL paper ( http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html ): "Stoyan's reading of the early LISP documents gives a more accurate picture than my own memories turned out to have given." http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/ http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/ > (As a side-note, I'm pretty sure that the broken, Wayback-beating link to "Lisp references according to Miller" on McCarthy's page is to this http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/Lisp-History.html http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/Lisp-Hist... document by Kent Pitman and Brad Miller (see http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/history.htm http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/history.h... ).) From 2015-2018, "The Mysteries of Lisp -- I: The Way to S-expression Lisp" by Hong-Yi Dai https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07375 https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07375 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153702 ) > Despite its old age, Lisp remains mysterious to many of its admirers. The mysteries on one hand fascinate the language, on the other hand also obscure it. Following Stoyan but paying attention to what he has neglected or omitted, in this first essay of a series intended to unravel these mysteries, we trace the development of Lisp back to its origin, revealing how the language has evolved into its nowadays look and feel. The insights thus gained will not only enhance existent understanding of the language but also inspires further improvement of it.