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.