Lets LISP like it's 1959

Kristoffer Grönlund explains John McCarthy's original 1959 LISP paper and demonstrates how to implement its self-interpreting evaluator in C.

Kristoffer Gronlund 2019.linux.conf.au/schedule/presentation/153/ One of my favorite papers in computer science is the original LISP paper by John McCarthy. Written in 1959, it describes something mind-bending: The interpreter for a language in the language that it interprets. If you understand this paper, you understand how computation works. A few years ago, I decided to implement the interpreter described in the paper, and this project turned out to be surprisingly popular. In this presentation, I'll show how to implement the original LISP interpreter in C, and together we will marvel at its elegance. linux.conf.au is a conference about the Linux operating system, and all aspects of the thriving ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software that has grown up around it. Run since 1999, in a different Australian or New Zealand city each year, by a team of local volunteers, LCA invites more than 500 people to learn from the people who shape the future of Open Source. For more information on the conference see linux.conf.au/ #linux.conf.au #linux #foss #opensource