Lisp (programming language)
![John McCarthy (top) and Steve Russell (bottom)](/Images/godic/202501/07/John_McCarthy_Stanford2901.jpg")
![](/Images/godic/202501/07/Steve_Russell2901.jpg")
![A Lisp machine in the MIT Museum](/Images/godic/202501/07/LISP_machine2902.jpg")
![4.3 BSD from the University of Wisconsin, displaying the man page for Franz Lisp](/Images/godic/202501/07/4.3_BSD_UWisc_VAX_Emulation_Lisp_Manual2902.png")
Lisp (historically, LISP) is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older (by one year). Lisp has changed a great deal since its early days, and a number of dialects have existed over its history. Today, the most widely known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp and Scheme.