Lisp was developed because McCarthy needed a tool for experimenting with AI. Found a video of McCarthy talking about AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozipf13jRr4

And if anyone cares, here is nice Shirt with McCarthy on it ;) https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/666689-john-mccarthy-lisp-...

I think it should be mandatory for CS students to implement their own little Lisp using the building blocks McCarthy described! Instead they are learning Java and ist crappy OO...

Is there a kind of walkthrough/tutorial about how to develop a little Lisp interpreter? That sounds like a fun experiment.

PS: Sorry, I am a Java OO developper. But I like to learn :)

For example: http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

But there's plenty more.