Dick Gabriel on Lisp



Dick Gabriel is an American computer scientist and is known for his work and researches related on Lisp. The 22th of January 2008, he was interviewed on the Software engineering radio (radio dedicated to professional software developers).

On this podcast, Dick Gabriel would like to prove to listeners that Lisp is a programming language that is worth it. He starts by introducing himself and presenting his career. One thing that immediately surprised me is the fact that this man made poetry and he still loves it. On one hand we can think that programming and poetry are part of different domains but on the other hand, both are a linked to an art form: programmers imagine and create programs and each program is unique, and it is the same with poetry. The combination of programming and art is for me a good way to develop our programming capacities. This combination helped Dick Gabriel in his domain: the artificial intelligence.

Dick Gabriel also talks about the features of Lisp. He first mentions the “macros” which are used to write code-generation routines (functions which takes Lisp forms or objects in input) and give more opportunities to the Lisp developers. Furthermore, he talks about the functional aspect of Lisp: the language is composed of functions, which take arguments (contrary to the functions called “prog”) and then return values. Functions are linked to each other and don’t have side effects.


For us, beginner developers in Lisp, programming in Lisp seems complicated; the syntax looks strange (so much parenthesis!) and unusual. But that is exactly what makes the difference with the other programming languages: it’s easier for the computer to parse programs and then the execution is faster, it has higher performances. This language is powerful and safe. The proof: Lisp has influenced a lot of programming languages. What about the future of Lisp? If developers agree to spend some time studying this useful language, it will be more famous and appreciated.

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