Welcome to Medley Interlisp for Beginners! This primer is intended for readers who've programmed before in at least one other language. We don't assume expertise but we do expect you to be comfortable with thinking in code and computation. So, some background, even if trivial, always helps!

Interlisp or Interactive Lisp is a dialect of LISP from the 80s. While Common Lisp was an amalgamation of community-guided standard practices, other interesting dialects at the periphery of the language were set aside. Interlisp, is one such "lispy" programming language. Medley is a graphical development environment built to facilitate exploratory and interactive programming with Interlisp and Common Lisp.

Together, Medley Interlisp is a powerful tool for building quick interfaces and modular LISP programs, with numerous quality-of-life features that still hold value for programmers coming from modern systems.

Before you dive into the primer, do take your time to explore the excellent collection of resources available https://interlisp.org/. As a newcomer, contextualizing this novel system in its history will add more color and texture to your experience. We urge that you do a bit of personal research about LISP's fascinating history, why it was so significant to the evolution of programming and how it differs from other languages.

If you're looking for a centralized hub of literature related to Interlisp and Medley, look no further than our rich bibliography at https://interlisp.org/history/bibliography/.

This primer is a great starting point! It'll teach you only a little more than the basics of Medley Interlisp. For a more exhaustive reference, please check out the Interlisp Reference Manual (IRM).

However, this primer, before anything, is a beginner's guide to programming in Interlisp. This text has one goal: to teach you different features of Medley Interlisp while parallelly building a solid foundation and muscle memory of writing Interlisp and interacting with Medley.