https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/from-whence-we-come-pt-2-78b53eaa7975

LISP is a family of programming languages, originally invented by John McCarthy at MIT in 1958. He was trying to describe a universal function, a Turing-complete language for generating algorithms.

It was implemented into an interpreter by Steve Russell when Russell realized the eval function could be implemented in machine code. This came as a surprise to McCarthy, who had intended it only for reading, not for actually computing.