Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Dick Gabriel on Lisp

The podcast starts with an introduction of Dick Gabriel and the projects he has worked on. It talks a lot of how a functional language works and how is very easy to use data and functions very easily. He begins explaining how a functional programming works and how you can distinguish the functions from the actual data. To do so, you just quote ‘ before the parenthesis.

Dick Gabriel has also spoken a little bit about macros and its importance. What I basically understood from this part is that Macros are programs that create more programs. This part has left me a bit curious cause I have also heard from older classmates that this is the topic they consider the hardest. Until this point, I have never done this in any language. The closest I have been is writing ejs scripts that generate HTML. I also don't know in what type of situations this is needed which makes me even more curious.

Dick also talks about Lisp's interpreter. One of its main features is that is metacircular, which means that is a language able to evaluate itself. I am also not sure I heard this correctly but the eval function was actually developed in just one night instead of months as they have thought. Lisp is also important for its influence and inspiration to other languages such as Ruby. Lisp is also a language that is favored for Artificial Intelligence.

The podcast ends making a big statement that Lisp as a functional language may appear really hard to be implemented. However, it lies a huge development potential. If you wait till the end of the podcast, you may also hear a song called God wrote in Lisp which if you listen to carefully can definitely  give you a good laugh.