Podcasts Write a post <a><img class="bars" src="" /></a> Dashboard New Article Settings Sign Out Sign In/Up Via Twitter Via Github Eric Normand Dec 13, 2016 lisp alan-kay LISP. It conjures up visions of a bygone age of computers the size of refrigerators, ALL CAPS CODE, and parentheses. Oh! so many parentheses! So why is Object-Oriented Programming's creator so enamored with the idea of Lisp? And what can he mean by a programming language being an idea anyway? Should I blame my Computer Science education for not teaching it to me? Lisp was first introduced to the world in a paper called Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Interpretation by Machines, Part I , written by John McCarthy. In it, McCarthy introduces many new ideas to programming. Among them are conditional expressions (that's right, if/then/el...