Dick Gabriel on Lisp Entry

Dick Gabriel on Lisp


Lisp is a functional programming language, that uses a lot of nesting functions, one of the main advantages is that programs and data are basically the same which makes programming easier.

So for practical purposes we will introduce Dick Gabriel a programmer with a long carrier and an interesting background, he's also a researcher which happens to be a Lisp "expert".

Gabriel does a curious analysis about Lisp,  it's funny that a functional programming language happens to have a non functional-core, the imperative side of Lisp which has a set of instructions to offer, just like sequence. On Lisp everything is evaluated that's one of the main reasons  the first thing you learn will be to use quote on lists.

According to Gabriel the grand goal of Lisp was to serve as a support of AI community maybe because of it's nature of smart evaluation and the big scope it has. Lisp also introduces an interesting concept the Meta circular interpreter which basically refers to a program that "it's interpreted itself", imagine the odds.

As other languages Lisp also has Macros which is an operation that produces the expression you want, this makes the language so flexible. Other features are: continuation (a way of resuming in functions) and hygienic macros.

Well let's talk about Lisp on the main areas of use: Lisp is used as a research programming language, also for some systems just like the reservation system Gabriel mention.

In the end what happened with Lisp? AI winter happens, there was so much hype for AI and Lisp leading the "implementation" that in the end there was no business result and of course they blame Lisp, when the problem was the angle they were viewing it.

So for today Lisp is a great functional programming languages, basically being one of the tools for researching.