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Comment on Ask HN: Why were people crazy about Lisp during 70s and 80s?

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Fortran was used for numeric domains. Algol was dead. Pascal was used in education and on early personal computers (for example at Apple). Prolog was very niche.

Lisp was used in education, as an early Functional Programming language and in symbolic AI. The latter had a considerable hype then.

Note also that Peter Seibel wrote an influential Common Lisp book, so the choice of people might have been influenced by the author...

Regarding his book, yeah I saw that, but I hadn't considered that as a possible cause of my observation as well. Well pointed.

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