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Between 1958 and 1960, it took them a good part of two years to get a compiler going. Little did they know that this costly delay would still have people saying that Lisp is fundamentally interpreted in 2026.

Delaying the publication of key papers in major journals until 1960, and loudly mentioning Lisp compilation as the first application of Lisp, didn't help; too late!

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This is just the Wikipedia page for "interpreters" so perhaps this is fake news but

> The first interpreted high-level language was Lisp. Lisp was first implemented by Steve Russell on an IBM 704 computer. Russell had read John McCarthy's paper, "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I", and realized (to McCarthy's surprise) that the Lisp eval function could be implemented in machine code.[3] The result was a working Lisp interpreter which could be used to run Lisp programs, or more properly, "evaluate Lisp expressions".

I.e. his realization that the Lisp eval function would behave as an interpreter came at the same time as his realization that the Lisp specification of the eval function can be translated to machine language. Though he did that by hand, within a short time, they had code doing that.

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