Skip to main content

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/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Secret History of Women in Coding

Currently, we can think that men were the first people that develop software or code to implement in some primitive computers, but it didn't happen in this way. For example, when Charlas Babbage create your Analytical Machine a woman was the first programmer when she designed a problem that make a Bernoulli sequence of numbers. Nevertheless, she wasn't the only one women that innovate in computational science. Around the history there were other important women that think very complex solutions to solve complicated problem that was the base for the current programs and software that exist. Whereupon doubt arises of knowing why decrease the number of programmers women that there are this times being that they are the pioneers in this topic.  I think it's sad that in our times it doesn't happen oftentimes. Computational science could look like a complicate topic, however there are people that they are so intelligent and brilliant to create new solution and proposals t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Presentation

Hi! My name is Felipe Osornio but my friends call me Deiv and I would like for you to call me that. I'm 21 years old and I'm studying Computational Systems.  Expectations I would like to learn many things about Programming Languages, about my teacher and my classmates. In fact, I would hope to acquire more knowledge about programming paradigms and to learn about Clojure.  Hobbies and personal interests I play drums since I was 15 years. When I began with this I used to play metalcore, deathcore and metal but after some years I began to play indie and things like pop punk, punk or rock punk.  Book, music and movies  My favorite book is  The Unbearable Lightness of Being . I read this book when I was in fifth semester. Also, I enjoy reading topics about absurdism and existentialism. One of my favorite authors is Albert Camus, because I really enjoy his philosophy  and how he sees  the reality in which we live in.  About music, I like...
Post a Comment
Read more