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Entry #4: Dick Gabriel on Lisp

"Dick Gabriel on Lisp" is a 60 minute long podcast produced by Software Engineering Radio in 2008. In this podcast, Dick Gabriel talks about his professional background and about the history of Lisp programming language and its functions and characteristics.

Dick Gabriel is a computer scientist who studied at the Stanford University. He started his own Lisp company in 1984. Lisp is one of the first programming languages developed with a functional approach. Functional means that a function can be evaluated and when it returns a value, it is then evaluated by another function and so on. The computation or algorithms are done by nesting functions, in other words, a function is data and a data can be a function.

However, other programming languages have taken over the industry in the next years, leaving behind Lisp. Modern programming languages have a more attractive and easier to understand method of coding in comparison to Lisp. Nevertheless, Lisp has been used in other programming languages, for example: Java has implemented the garbage collector, while Ruby has it in the meta-language. Lisp is a language thas has the lists as the principal tools to evaluate, in order to work with concepts like the apparently and infinitely recursion of functions and the using of  macros to extend the language.

People who work with Artificial Intelligence (AI) write programs that no one else knows how to code, and that it is the goal of Lisp. The programming language uses a metacircular interpreter, meaning that the compiler is written in the same programming language of the program that is interpreted.

Macros are a coding section that produces an expression that you want,in order to extend the language. Macros are one of the most interesting features of Lisp, that makes possible the creation of a new and competitive company. 

Podcast: Gabriel, R. (2008). Episode 84: Dick Gabriel on Lisp. Recovered from http://www.se-radio.net/2008/01/episode-84-dick-gabriel-on-lisp/

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