Common Lisp: The Untold Story (2012)

This paper summarizes a talk given at “Lisp50@OOPSLA,” the 50th Anniversary of Lisp workshop, Monday, October 20, 2008, an event co-located with the OOPSLA’08 in Nashville, TN, in which I offered my personal, subjective account of how I came to be involved with Common Lisp and the Common Lisp standard, and of what I learned from the process. The original design of the Common Lisp language, culminating in the 1984 publication of Common Lisp: The Language was designed not by an ANSI committee but just by a set of interested individuals. They were leaning toward concluding that was the dialect of choice because it seemed to be deployed at more locations than any other single dialect, but a case was made that many variants were really the same dialect and could be collected under a single Common Lisp banner.

Source: www.nhplace.com