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Lisp Programming Language: John Mccarthy
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Over the last 50 years, the Lisp programming language has become the dominant computer language in the American Artificial Intelligence community. John McCarthy developed Lisp, at MIT in the late 1950's, to help computers cope with such problems as symblic differentiation and integration of algebraic expressions. The first Lisp interpreter was implemented at MIT. Lisp is the second oldest computer language (Fortran is the oldest).
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LISP is among the oldest high level programming languages. It was first developed in 1958 by John McCarthy. It was later adopted as the primary research language of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which was born at a research conference in 1956. Despite later developments of such languages as FORTRAN, BASIC, ALGOL, APL, and C, LISP remains the predominant language in AI. There are a number of reasons as to why LISP continues to see widespread use.
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The now-ubiquitous if-then-else structure, now taken for granted as an essential element of any programming language, was invented by McCarthy for use in Lisp, where it saw its first appearance in a more general form (the cond structure). It was inherited by Algol, which popularized it.
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