How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
> McCarthy built Lisp out of parts so fundamental that it is hard to say whether he invented it or discovered it.<p>I loved that sentence! I'm guessing epistemology or a similar field has pondered the "invented or discovered" question already, and if so, I want to read about it.<p>> [on SICP:] Those concepts were general enough that any language could have been used<p>What?? In chapter 4, you write your own Lisp interpreter. If they had chosen C++, would you be writing a C++ compiler? Or a Lisp interpreter in C++? Either way, it would be ugly. And most languages would encounter problems even before they got to chapter 4. What made SICP great was building abstractions out of primitives. Most languages give you some abstractions, and others simply can't be built (at least not elegantly). I can't imagine SICP using a language that doesn't feel a lot like Lisp.<p>That said, count me among the people whose first Lisp exposure was SICP. And yeah, it was really fun and really enlightening. I am loving Racket now, but Racket is big and practical. SICP is small and beautiful - as I recall, the authors deliberately avoid using most of the language. (They used Scheme, but I think Lisp would have worked fine too, right?)