Clase 5 - Dick Gabriel on Lisp

 Clase 5 - Dick Gabriel on Lisp

I find it very interesting that the creation of the LISP language was based on artificial intelligence, and especially how the compiler was created. It was not just built-in 1 night but it was hand compiled and basically became the complier for all future lisps programs. This compiler function called EVAL and it’s a metacircular compiler because it is written itself in LISP which was quite astonishing at that time.

It seems that LISP had a very similar evolution to many other languages but it always found a way to generalize and be different. It started with the creation of specialized languages for each topic. Then it went into macros and object-oriented programing with Scheme and other variants. What I found wired is that they always returned to the same idea that everything is a function and keep on building on that whole idea of lists and functions as basic elements of the language. In the podcast, it was hard to understand in deep all the terms but it seems as if it was the most powerful language around.

So we always come back to the same question. Why is LISP considerer a language of the past? They can say that it is because it was not statically typed. But that argument would seem very irrelevant now that some of the most common languages are not statically typed as Python. So in my personal option LISP is a language that had plenty of promises but never delivered. I can’t deny that it did not produce hundredths or even thousands of ideas that are implemented today in all programming languages. And that for sure has to be valued and remembered. But that is all it has to be it has come the time to move on from LISP and stop seeing it as a could have been the golden crown.

Mauricio Cassab