lunes, 9 de septiembre de 2019

Blog 1-4: Dick Gabriel on Lisp (Podcast)


This podcast focuses mainly on covering LISP, a functional programming language that until the recording of the podcast was celebrating its 49 year of existence. Dick Gabriel mentions that the core of LISP is that everything on the language is a function; this means, that takes arguments and returns a value where its computation is based on nesting functions. Also, it is important to mention that the principal data structures that lisp manages are functions and lists.

Before the born of LISP language, the mathematicians, the logicians and the computer scientists where trying to solve a big problem, the computability. They were wondering if it exists a form or a system that could compute anything that could be computed, the best example of this was the Universal Turing Machine that was structured by an infinite tape (cells), a head that reads the content of that tape (more specifically the content of each cell in that infinite tape) and last but no least the program that will move the tape left or right depending on the input given.

As almost all languages LISP has its pros and cons of using it, but it is important to mention that the syntax is both of them, has its pros and cons. The principal con of the LISP syntax is that LISP does not have a structured syntax but its pro is that you do not need to worry for parsing or syntax. The only thing you need to worry about is the expressiveness of what you write.

Other of the kindness of LISP are their generic functions. Dick Gabriel mentions in the podcast that a generic function handles the input given to return next the function that goes with that certain input, for example the function “plus” or the “integer” function both of them figures out what code to run.

Finally, LISP is used primarily in the Artificial Intelligence research, in robotics, etc.; however, when we talk in a commercial way it is still buyable because not all of its implementations are open source.

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