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Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers Podcast
Episode 84: Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Episode 84: Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers vor 18 Jahren

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In this Episode we're talking with Dick Gabriel on Lisp. We started
by looking at artificial intelligence as the historic context of
Lisp, the goals AI tried to reach, and how Lisp was supposed to
help reach those. We then discussed the language itself, starting
with the Data As Program / Program As Data concept that is a
foundation for Lisp. Then we discussed adding a meta-circular
interpreter, programming as language development, and the blurred
boundary between language and frameworks (because everything uses
the same syntax). We then talked about Lisp's type system and the
importance of macros to extend the language. The next section
concerned CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System and its important
concepts: generic functions, multimethods, mixins, and method
combination. We also briefly looked at the meta-object protocol but
agreed this is a topic for a separate episode. After a discussion
about the various dialects of Lisp and Scheme, we concluded the
Lisp discussion by explaining why Lisp did not really catch on ("AI
Winter") and Lisp's role in today's industry. We ended the episode
with a couple of details about Dick's other life as a poet and his
Poem a Day effort. Make sure you listen till the end, where we have
added a song about Lisp (courtesy of Prometheus Music.)