SF: If nothing else, Lisp was carefully defined in terms of Lisp.

AK: Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

I realized that anytime I want to know what I’m doing, I can just write down the kernel of this thing in a half page and it’s not going to lose any power. In fact, it’s going to gain power by being able to reenter itself much more readily than most systems done the other way can possibly do.

All of these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

Alan Kay in an Interview (2004)

This, by Michael Nielsen also is really useful when considering this perspective that Alan Kay is proposing here:

https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equations-of-software/

Raymond Smullyan, To Mock a Mockingbird (1985)

Charles H. Moore, Programming a Problem-Oriented Language (1970)