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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

My favorite bit of this history is that the first Lisp interpreter was written in Lisp.

One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons."

Moon patiently told the student the following story -- "One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector..."

My favorite bit of this history is that the first Lisp interpreter was written in Lisp.

(hmmm, maybe it would be a bit spammy if I recursed this statement several more times.)

I am calling "turtles" on this.

That won't do you any good - the first Logo interpreter was also written in Lisp.

It was written on paper, and then a human converted it to machine language by hand.

Yes?

The first Lisp compiler was written in Lisp, not the first Lisp interpreter (src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%2... ).

You're misunderstanding what was said there.

The interpreter was written in Lisp. It was compiled by a human. A Lisp compiler did not come into existence until a long time later.

Lisp compilers came into existence relatively early after interpreter, because of performance. And early compilers and interpreters had important differences in semantics, what everyone today means by "lisp" was in that day the behavior of compiled code, not interpreted (ie. dynamic vs. lexical scoping). The real value of first implementations of scheme was that they had shown that same semantics as were implemented by lisp compilers could be implemented by reasonably fast interpreter. And today there is Newlisp which has impressive performance for interpreted implementation, because it implements similar semantics as early interpreted lisps.

That captures the entire spirit of the language.

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