This timeline started with Teitelman’s History of Interlisp. The Bibliography has a wealth of additional historical information. 1960s Through the 1960s, the languages of programming were primarily Fortran and assembly. Lisp enabled expressing recursion simply. Lisp also provided the ability to modify a program as it was running, since Lisp programs were themselves data—the same as other list structures used to represent program data. This made Lisp an ideal language for writing programs that th...