Mary Rose Cook: Writing a Lisp interpreter in JavaScript

A classic exercise in introductory computer science courses is to build your own Lisp interpreter. Doing so not only gives you an understanding of how the language is built, but of how programming languages are generally built — and it also demonstrates that languages are often the sum of many simple ideas and parts. In this talk, Mary Rose Cook creates a Lisp interpreter using JavaScript, such that it runs in the browser. If you have always wondered how programming languages work, this is a great way to see it done — in a language that’s available to all of us.

Leave a Reply