Lisp: An AI programming language

Lisp has been the programming language of choice of most artificial intelligence (AI) researchers since the very early days of AI research. There are many reasons why this is so, some of which will be examined later in this paper, but perhaps the simplest reason is functional crispness. Every language has arbitrary features, and most languages have been overloaded with them in order to support diverse constituencies. Lisp is built around a kernel of mathematical principles which makes it far more flexible than most other (perhaps all) computer programming languages.