Dick Gabriel Podcast


Dick Gabriel has some mathematic and artificial intelligence degrees. Also, he has a LISP company. The podcast is an interview with Dick Gabriel that talks about the relation between LISP and artificial intelligence. He started describing briefly what LISP is. For Dick Gabriel, one of the principal characteristics of LISP is the use of lists and functions. Also, the program as data and data as program is another foundation of LISP. Later, he mentioned that the fact that user can define functions as it was built in the language is a great advantage of using LISP. Regarding artificial intelligence, he said that the artificial intelligence researchers want to write programs for specific tasks, so they want to find a language that could fit their needs. Then, using LISP let them design and build their own language, making an extension of LISP, in order to have a personalized language that covers all their needs. Moreover, another thing that makes LISP different is the use of macros, which is another way to extend and personalize the language.  I think that this is an interesting topic, because at the start of the course I didn’t really understand why Clojure (a LISP based language) is a language that could help us to learn about programming languages. But, listening the podcast and with my short experience with Clojure, I can say that Clojure, and obviously LISP, is a powerful language. Thus, learning a LISP based language teaches you not only how to program in a new language, otherwise how to design and build your own language. In the other hand, before I started to listen the podcast, I couldn’t imagine how the relation between AI and LISP was, and I found very interesting that the fact that you can build your own language gives you a big advantage to reach your goal.

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