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Dick Gabriel on Lisp

One hour can be lo... short!

 In the podacst from Software Engineering Radio,  Richard P. Gabriel talks about some characteristics and facts of LISP. Before starting the podcast I thought this will be boring and also take a long time. But I was wrong and the time just flew by.
Step by step I´m learning more about Programming Languages in general, Clojure, LISP and the history behind this. It is really interesting how important the role of LISP has been in artificial intelligence. I was always really interested in this kind of matter but I never went to deep. I could not imagine, that there are such advantages over other languages.
He also spoke about the fact, that everything in LISP is a function and the mandatory nesting (which I do not always get in Clojure). Regarding this, it is very important to understand the concept of sequences (lists),because this is the core of the language
One of the major goals of LISP according to Gabriel was to write code which no one knew how to write. I can share his opinion to a certain degree. Even in my naive mind I think there has to be more behind this.
When he talked about macros I have to say, I couldn´t follow all he said. So I focused on the part where he mentoined that LISP is still used sometimes in some IA research. Very surprising for me was, that he referred to the same startup, about which I wrote last week.
I have to admit, even I wasn´t paying full attention the whole time, it was totally worth it listening to the song from Prometheus Music!
I really love/hate learning more about functional programming. On the one hand it is really fascinating what you all can do with it. On the other hand I´m really struggling with the whole concept (and programming). Maybe my brain needs to be knodded out before I can really understand what I´m learning.

References:
Gabriel, D. (2008). Dick Gabriel on Lisp. [Online]
Retrieved from: http://www.se-radio.net/2008/01/episode-84-dick-gabriel-on-lisp/

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