"Dick Gabriel on Lisp" - Personnal Comments

This podcast is an interview in which Richard P. Gabriel talks about the programming language Lisp. Dick Gabriel has degrees in mathematics and artificial intelligence obtained at Stanford University. In the first part he talks about the early ages of artificial intelligence. I learned that Lisp was the main programming language used for this area back in the 1960s before becoming a system language.

Then he details the core of the programming language with its concepts. I didn’t understand all of what he said. I think that he detailed a bit too much the concepts of the language. I was asking myself : “but why talking so much about a language that is not used anymore?”. By the time I thought about it he mentioned some chronology that I found interesting. In the 1980’s the language Lisp was the Java of its day. This shows how important the language was at the day. But then it disappeared in the 1990s. And he answered my question by explaining that today Lisp is used in some artificial intelligence research centers, several companies that produce implementation of Lisp and other areas like computer vision or robotics.

In the last part he talks about himself and his career. I was surprised to learn that when he came back from his break in 1998 he discovered that the language Lisp had disappeared from universities research centers. This was because the language was hard to learn and programs ran slow. He could no longer do research or publish about Lisp. He then became a consultant for companies and then a poet.

In my opinion this podcast was interesting but maybe a bit too long and technical. I am thinking about the part where he details the Lisp data structures and programs. I am curious to know why some languages disappeared and others have huge success.