Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Dick Gabriel on Lisp. Before listening to this podcast, I had never heard about Dick Gabriel. I have just realized he is a computer scientist graduated from Stanford University, but not a normal one, he uses the Lisp programming language. Actually, he had his own company where they program using Lisp. This is really impressing for me because the only other case of a Lisp based company is the Viaweb case I talked about in my last blog.

As I already said, I’m not into Lisp. But I want to support a classmate’s blog that also talks about Lisp and this podcast. In his blog, Guillermo Pérez Trueba talks about the importance and the reason of why Lisp is used in AI programs. Whenever you try to use Lisp, it results confusing for most of the developers, the reason? The sea of parenthesis it uses. Nevertheless, the words of Dick Gabriel start making sense to me. Lisp as a non-syntax syntax programing language and, based on the usage of lists and macros, it gives us a great versatility to develop AI programs.

A supposition made by Guillermo really caught my attention. He argues that one of the reasons why Lisp is used on AI is because only programmers with great skills can understand it, and even use it (Dick Gabriel refers to those programmers as wizard programmers). I support this statement because I find it really hard to understand Lisp programs.

Dick Gabriel said that Lisp is an inspiration for other programming languages that nowadays are commonly used such as Java or Ruby. So, why Lisp is not used in the same way as those ones? I think that Lisp will be becoming the most used programming language. I believe in the power of macros because they give Lisp an expansion or extension possibility.  It will overcome any other programming language.

An additional point I want to talk about is that Dick Gabriel is not only a Lisp “wizard programmer”, but he is also a poet. I really want to test his poetry and find out if he is also a wizard poet.

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