While Lisp had to have some path from then to now, it is interesting to ask how important the mathematical foundations really are. Lisp is really a celebration of the humble function - everything bar nothing is some variant of (function arg arg arg). While the mathematicians were the first people to isolate that it seems quite likely it would have been naturally discovered from the engineering branch of programming when someone started trying to push the bounds of a macro system and realised that all the syntax was getting the way.<p>I suspect Lisp has incredible longevity because it is nearly impossible to simplify down from functions. The approach also seems to breed a certain level of flexibility that other languages struggle to match - I have seen software that does a better job of editing text than Emacs, but I have not seen software more capable of taking on any challenge. Even Excel doesn't have quite the same level plumbing-exposed openness that can be achieved with a raw stack of functions. But I think alien civilisations would also invent Common Lisp, although they might use square brackets or somesuch.