American computer scientist John McCarthy (1927–).

LISP, an acronym for LISt Processing, is a programming language developed by John McCarthy in the late 1950s. Although LISP is a general-purpose language, it is often thought of as a language solely for artificial intelligence (AI) programming, for which it is often used. AI programming often deals with symbolic processing that the standard programming languages are ill-prepared to handle. Symbolic processing focuses on the representation of real-world concepts and on the relationships among the objects rather than numeric processing.

At the time that LISP was under development, other AI programming languages were being developed with rather informal approaches. McCarthy, a mathematician, wanted to establish a firm scientific foundation for LISP. That foundation came from formal logic. American logician Alonzo Church (1903–1995) had developed a clear and unambiguous means of describing the inputs and internal computations of functions. The lambda...