Dick Gabriel on Lisp.
Dick Gabriel was interviewed by Markus in 2008. They talked about Lisp, the programming language. They talked about all the lisp characteristics, what it meant to the industry in the past, what it is used for nowadays and what it could be used for in the future.
Lisp used a “meta circular” interpreter, that is, the interpreter is written the same as the code it interprets. Also he mentions how the lisp macros are different to other languages, in the sense that they must return lists. He also explains how everything in lisp works as a list, in the sense that a function receives lists as parameters, and check the first element of a list, searching for another function, and then, that function is executed using the next elements of the list.
One advantage lisp has is that it is strongly and dynamically type, meaning that the programmer doesn’t need to specify a type for a variable, same as python, the value is assigned to the variable, and then that variable changes the type to the values type.
Today, lisp is not used massively, although it was the Java of the 80’s, now there are just a handful of applications for lisp today, it is still used for some AI research, the Yahoo store uses it, some computer vision software, it is also used in robotics. Lisp in general is still a viable language. In general, Lisp is used as an extension language or in other cases, a scripting language.
Lisp was used on the 80’s for AI, companies were developing systems that slowly could take decision. They created a lot of hype, but couldn’t deliver the expected results, so they blamed lisp, because it was a language oriented to mathematicians, so it was complicated for beginners because of the syntax and the programmers that did know how to use it, were expensive, so the “AI winter” happened.
Ruby has lisp influences, also java borrowed lisp garbage collection.
Dick Gabriel was interviewed by Markus in 2008. They talked about Lisp, the programming language. They talked about all the lisp characteristics, what it meant to the industry in the past, what it is used for nowadays and what it could be used for in the future.
Lisp used a “meta circular” interpreter, that is, the interpreter is written the same as the code it interprets. Also he mentions how the lisp macros are different to other languages, in the sense that they must return lists. He also explains how everything in lisp works as a list, in the sense that a function receives lists as parameters, and check the first element of a list, searching for another function, and then, that function is executed using the next elements of the list.
One advantage lisp has is that it is strongly and dynamically type, meaning that the programmer doesn’t need to specify a type for a variable, same as python, the value is assigned to the variable, and then that variable changes the type to the values type.
Today, lisp is not used massively, although it was the Java of the 80’s, now there are just a handful of applications for lisp today, it is still used for some AI research, the Yahoo store uses it, some computer vision software, it is also used in robotics. Lisp in general is still a viable language. In general, Lisp is used as an extension language or in other cases, a scripting language.
Lisp was used on the 80’s for AI, companies were developing systems that slowly could take decision. They created a lot of hype, but couldn’t deliver the expected results, so they blamed lisp, because it was a language oriented to mathematicians, so it was complicated for beginners because of the syntax and the programmers that did know how to use it, were expensive, so the “AI winter” happened.
Ruby has lisp influences, also java borrowed lisp garbage collection.
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