Lispfamily

Lispfamily refers to the group of programming languages descended from Lisp or heavily influenced by Lisp design. Lisp languages are characterized by symbolic computation, code-as-data with S-expressions, and powerful macro systems that enable syntactic extension. They often feature interactive development, dynamic typing, and garbage collection. A defining trait is homoiconicity, where code has the same structure as data.

Origins and history: Lisp was created by John McCarthy in 1958. Early dialects included Lisp 1.5 and MacLisp. In the 1980s ANSI Common Lisp unified several divergent Lisp dialects, while Scheme emerged in the 1970s as a minimalist dialect emphasizing clean semantics. Other major branches include Emacs Lisp, used to extend the GNU editor, and more recent Lisp-inspired languages such as Clojure and Racket (formerly PLT Scheme).

Major dialects and ecosystems: Common Lisp provides a large standard and a broad set of implementations (SBCL, CMUCL). Scheme has standard revisions (R5RS, R6RS, R7RS). Emacs Lisp powers Emacs extensions. Clojure runs on the Java Virtual Machine with a focus on functional programming and immutability; it also has ClojureCLR and ClojureScript. Racket, born from PLT Scheme, is popular for teaching and language-oriented programming.

Impact: The Lisp family has influenced macro systems, metaprogramming, and language design in many languages. Concepts from Lisp, such as garbage collection, first-class functions, and dynamic features in some dialects, persist in modern languages. Today Lisp-derived languages remain used in academia, AI research, software tooling, and rapid prototyping.