“Lisp is a programmable programming language.”
— John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
— Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition
“That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.”
— George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
“One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.”
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
“Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.”
— Alan Kay
“Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”
— Philip Greenspun (Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming)
“Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.”
— Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"
“Lisp is a programmer amplifier.”
— Martin Rodgers
“Common Lisp, a happy amalgam of the features of previous Lisps.”
— Winston & Horn, Lisp
“Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me.”
— David Thornley
“SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.”
— Philip Greenspun
“Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
— Alan Kay
“The greatest single programming language ever designed.”
— Alan Kay, on Lisp
“I object to doing things that computers can do.”
— Olin Shivers
“Lisp is a language for doing what you've been told is impossible.”
— Kent Pitman
“Lisp is the red pill.”
— John Fraser
“Within a couple weeks of learning Lisp I found programming in any other language unbearably constraining.”
— Paul Graham
“Programming in Lisp is like playing with the primordial forces of the universe. It feels like lightning between your fingertips. No other language even feels close.”
— Glenn Ehrlich
“A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.”
— Alan Perlis
“Lisp is the most sophisticated programming language I know. It is literally decades ahead of the competition ... it is not possible (as far as I know) to actually use Lisp seriously before reaching the point of no return.”
— Christian Lynbech, Road to Lisp
“[Lisp] has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.”
— Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6, 1918