11 Aug, 2026

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it." — Eric S. Raymond

Welcome. Today you'll learn a language from one of programming's oldest and most unusual families. A language where code is data, where parentheses are pure structure, and where programs can write programs. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have written your own syntax.

A bit of history

Lisp was born in 1958 , invented by John McCarthy at MIT. For context: it's the second-oldest high-level language still in use (only Fortran, from 1957, beats it by a year). Python arrived in 1991. JavaScript in 1995.…