Dick Gabriel on Lisp

For this week’s entry we listened to what Dick Gabriel had to say about Lisp. Dick Gabriel is a prominent programmer known for his work on common Lisp. I particularly liked this week’s assignment because Gabriel seems like a real ‘Master Yoda’ when it comes to Lisp.

First, the interviewer and Gabriel give us the usual briefing about Lisp, how it was one of the earliest programming languages, how it’s largely based on nesting functions and its heavy use on AI applications. Then they speak of how Lisp was born, how they wanted to have something with a certain degree of intelligence, and I found interesting the analogy he does with the language being a lot like a city, with programs never ceasing to run.

I found interesting the fact that according to Gabriel, Lisp was created overnight as an attempt of having a program that could compute anything, and how its eval function had to be hand-compiled. Also thanks to Gabriel it became clear to me how it is that Lisp works with lists by evaluating the first element and passing it the rest of the elements if it is a function. Something that really amused me is how Gabriel tells the story of students handing in an elaborate programming language they made for their dissertations as their actual dissertation. And how in the ‘70s and ‘80s everyone had their on Lisp dialect because Interne wasn’t widely available then.

What really caught my eye (ear) is that in every weekly assignment, I’ve read or heard about the huge power of Macros, and I’m now really starting to get curious about how they work or what they do, because every time I’m met with “it’s too complex to explain right now” or the “program that programs itself” oversimplification.

Other thing I found interesting is how across all weekly assignments we could see how Lisp has almost died, but it’s so powerful that it survives up until this day.