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Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Lisp is one of the first functional programming languages in the world. This paradigm is very different from programming languages and paradigms that we frequently use. In this podcast, Dick Gabriel tells us how was his experience with Lisp and how it still is the most important base for other functional languages. 

In the first minutes, Dick Gabriel tells us all about his background and his personal interest in functional programming languages. Also, he comments on how Lisp works through functions and his abstraction level. For example, the main form in which Lisp works is receiving arguments in its functions and returning values. It is interesting to know that Lisp is used by programmers to construct artificial intelligence performance to know how life or humans works and their limitations. These kind of examples are a little bit simple to represent in functional languages as Lisp. 

Dick Gabriel in the podcast tells us how Lisp, despite of being an elegant programming language in many cases, it is not as friendly as we would think. We are familiarized with programming languages in which it is necessary to write a high amount of lines, in contrast, Lisp does not work in this way. The amount of lines necessary to write a simple or complex program in Lisp, being a functional language, are considerably few.

Lisp avoids us the constant use of brackets or curly brackets. Programming languages as Java, C#, C, C++ need to use brackets often and this type of things complicate the program syntax and the legibility. However, a programming language as Lisp that only works with parenthesis, lessens the reading difficulty of a program.

Finally, Lisp, being a compact language and strong type, is good for reuse, work, test and so on, but it is a little complicate to write and understand. Therefore, it is important to try to spend a lot of time enhancing our knowledge in Lisp. After some hours, days and weeks, it is posible that our comprehension in Lisp and in other functional programming languages will be better than we were at the beginning in these kind of programming languages.


Reference 

 Markus (Host). (2008, January 2). Episode 84. Dick Gabriel on Lisp [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.se-radio.net/2010/03/episode-158-rich-hickey-on-clojure/

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