Lisp50: The 50th birthday of lisp at OOPSLA 2008

In October 1958, John McCarthy published one in a series of reports about his then ongoing effort for designing a new programming language that would be especially suited for achieving artificial intelligence. That report was the first one to use the name LISP for this new programming language. 50 years later, Lisp is still in use. We would like to celebrate Lisp's 50 th birthday. OOPSLA 2008 is an excellent venue for such a celebration, because object-oriented programming benefitted heavily from Lisp ideas and because OOPSLA 2008 takes place in October, exactly 50 years after the name Lisp has been used publicly for the first time. We will have talks by John McCarthy himself, and numerous other influential Lispers from the past five decades. We will also take a look at the next 50 years of Lisp.