TEC - Programming Language 2018 - Luca Z

This podcast is an interview with Rich Hickey in which he talks about the programming language Lisp (once again). He starts by introducing the language and its characteristics. I have learned why Lisp different from others languages. The thing that makes Lisp unique as a programming language is that programs are presented to the compiler in forms of data structures. The compiler doesn’t compile text but it compiles data structures. Why Lisp never got mainstream ? It wasn’t design to be mainstream, more for researchers people solving very hard problems. Today programming is like a social activity, people work together on programs.  When the compiler is evaluating your program it gives your macros the opportunity to run during the compilation process. That also is a unique feature of the language Lisp. Ritch Hickey then explains the cooperation of the Lip with the language Java and the simplicity of Lisp. Indeed Lisp is able to access all Java libraries so this doesn’...

This article was written by Paul Graham in the year 2002. It deals with the differences between programming languages and especially the importance to chose the correct language when writing a new software or solving a problem.  Once again, the language Lisp is defended. It is said that programmers can write much faster in Lisp than other languages such as C. From a competitive point of view it is true that it is an advantage for a company to have Lisp programmers if they can write software and deliver it two or three times faster than other programmers.  But if Lisp is such a good language, why isn’t it still widely used ? I have looked for an internship 6 months ago and I have never came across an offer that asked for some Lisp skills. The picture that the author uses to describe a random IT manager that is afraid to take “cutting-edge” decisions is quite good. I think he is right. It can be dangerous to take risks because if a project fails it can have huge fi...

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 artif...