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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