Dick Gabriel on Lisp

It is certainly fascinating how a language like Lisp can do so much stuff I didn’t even know about.

I personally have never used Lisp and probably never will due to being such an old language. Although I am learning to use a language called Clojure which is a descendant of Lisp. And hearing what Dick Gabriel said of what Lisp has to offer I wonder if more modern languages, Lisp descendant or not, have taken some of the features of Lisp.

The part that called my attention the most was the fact that Lisp used to be used for AI research.

Today AI has mostly turned in the direction of Machine Learning and data analysis, which is certainly not a bad thing of course, however it was fascinating to learn that Lisp had a way of compiling code of itself and that it in theory was possible to create a Machine that could write code of itself, compile it, and test it to solve complex problems. Even in the 1980’s this idea was considered to be possible.

Personally I don’t particularly like functional programming languages because they require a little more effort to produce good code, functional and efficient code, than in other programming languages like imperative languages. However the fact that I don’t like it or that it gets a little bit complicated for all the parenthesis it involves, doesn’t mean I don’t see the power a functional language provides.

In the podcast I don’t remember hearing if the new languages they mention like Java or Ruby have these interesting features Lisp had and I really hope they do. Because I am really interested in studying AI, and not only machine learning. I mention this because it would be so sad this features disappeared of modern languages because they were dimmed unnecessary or unpractical. I mean Lisp is complicated but efficient and powerful. And just because something is complicated or a little bit hard to use, doesn’t mean we should abandon it. We should learn how it works, take it and implement it in some other way it is way easier for everybody to use.

Women & Programming

It is really sad to read about all the great things that humans can do collectively, and take the credit for themselves for something as stupid as gender or sex.

Specially when you hear about what happened in the computer science field. I personally didn’t know that women were so involved in the field that in fact a very big chunk of the programmers of the time were female. And that progressively due to discrimination or some stupid thing like that, women were becoming less interested in pursuing a career as programmers.

Speaking from experience I know my fair share of women who are really smart, some even smarter than myself. And it is sad and frustrating to think that women like that will never even consider a career as programmers because of the discrimination.

This also applies for all fields of engineering as gender roles tend to influence the girls to do girly things as playing with dolls and so on. Which in some sense is not wrong, but, I believe that if any body show a desire to study maths or computers, regardless of their gender, we should encourage them to do so because it is way better to have engineers than a lack of them. Besides women aren’t stupid by any means. Due to their meticulous nature and special ability to pay attention to details is that they would be better at debugging and looking for mistakes in code or math formulas or procedures or something like that.

In fact at the beginning of the article it comes an interesting fact that the idea of break-point for debugging code, was actually the idea of a woman.

In conclusion, as a culture we should encourage all people to enrol in math and computer related subjects, regardless of gender. Not let history define the future of science because if women in the past were way better than some men at the time. Why now that shouldn’t be true?