Common Lisp in the context of Scott Fahlman

Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, via a series of memos now known as the Lambda Papers. It was the first dialect of Lisp to choose lexical scope and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization, giving stronger support for functional programming and associated techniques such as recursive algorithms. It was also one of the first programming languages to support first-class continuations. It had a significant influence on the effort that led to the development of Common Lisp.

The Scheme language is standardized in the official Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard and a de facto standard called the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (RnRS). A widely implemented standard is R5RS (1998). The most recently ratified standard of Scheme is "R7RS-small" (2013). The more expansive and modular R6RS was ratified in 2007. Both trace their descent from R5RS; the timeline below reflects the chronological order of ratification.

In computer science, bootstrapping is the technique for producing a self-compiling compiler – that is, a compiler (or assembler) written in the source programming language that it intends to compile. An initial core version of the compiler (the bootstrap compiler) is generated in a different language (which could be assembly language); successive expanded versions of the compiler are developed using this minimal subset of the language. The problem of compiling a self-compiling compiler has been called the chicken-or-egg problem in compiler design, and bootstrapping is a solution to this problem.

Bootstrapping is a fairly common practice when creating a programming language. Many compilers for many programming languages are bootstrapped, including compilers for ALGOL, BASIC, C, Common Lisp, D, Eiffel, Elixir, Factor, Go, Haskell, Java, Modula-2, Nim, Oberon, OCaml, Pascal, PL/I, Python, Rust, Scala, Scheme, TypeScript, Vala, Zig and more.

Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation.Originally specified in the late 1950s, it is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use, after Fortran. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, and Clojure.

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by (though not originally derived from) the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became a favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, the self-hosting compiler, and the read–eval–print loop.

LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies that can be used to develop a frontend for any programming language and a backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate representation (IR) that serves as a portable, high-level assembly language that can be optimized with a variety of transformations over multiple passes. The name LLVM originally stood for Low Level Virtual Machine. However, the project has since expanded, and the name is no longer an acronym but an orphan initialism.

LLVM is written in C++ and is designed for compile-time, link-time, and runtime optimization. Originally implemented for C and C++, the language-agnostic design of LLVM has since spawned a wide variety of frontends: languages with compilers that use LLVM (or which do not directly use LLVM but can generate compiled programs as LLVM IR) include ActionScript, Ada, C# for .NET, Common Lisp, PicoLisp, Crystal, CUDA, D, Delphi, Dylan, Forth, Fortran, FreeBASIC, Free Pascal, Halide, Haskell, Idris, Jai (only for optimized release builds), Java bytecode, Julia, Kotlin, LabVIEW's G language, Objective-C, OpenCL, PostgreSQL's SQL and PL/pgSQL, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Standard ML, Swift, Xojo, and Zig.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on objects – software entities that encapsulate data and function(s). An OOP computer program consists of objects that interact with one another. An OOP language is one that provides object-oriented programming features, but as the set of features that contribute to OOP is contested, classifying a language as OOP – and the degree to which it supports OOP – is debatable. As paradigms are not mutually exclusive, a language can be multi-paradigm (i.e. categorized as more than only OOP).

Notable languages with OOP support include Ada, ActionScript, C++, Common Lisp, C#, Dart, Eiffel, Fortran 2003, Haxe, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Logo, MATLAB, Objective-C, Object Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Raku, Ruby, Scala, SIMSCRIPT, Simula, Smalltalk, Swift, Vala and Visual Basic (.NET).