Dick Gabriel on LISP

In this podcast Dick Gabriel was interviewed, he is a programmer that loves lisp and even has a Company based on lisp. At the start, he gives a brief explanation of what is lisp and he mentions that lisp a Young Language and at that time it was almost the 50th anniversary, basically he mentions that lisp is a functional Language where everything Works using nested functions.  I really liked the passion with which he speaks and it amazed me the fact that lisp is crucial of AI investigation, I did not know this and was really interested in how it was more useful than other languages.

I believe lisp is a very powerful programming language, it is a little complicated since you have to think in a different way, you have to analyze problems differently and at the end it is a language that you don’t see every day.

It is interesting to know that lisp was the inspiration for other languages like ruby, I don’t know about this language other than it is used on web development and it is quite popular nowadays, I have not used lisp a lot out of school but I truly believe that if I can “master” the language I could have a very powerful tool at my disposal, it is so powerful but yet somehow small and I understand the reason Dick would make a company around lisp.

Beating the averages

This reading was interesting because it shows how by being an “expert” into one important thing in your organization you can beat everyone, it is just one example but it is a great example because it gives a great perspective and reasons of why it works and why sometimes you have to take chances if you know you have a great idea, in our business it is crucial for companies to find something to differentiate themselves and to give them edge in the market and in this instance lisp was that.

As the previous reading, it is important to note that each language has its own strengths and weaknesses and in this case, everything that paul says confirms this that they made their choice of language based on the advantages that lisp would bring to them and it gave them a clear advantage over their competitors because they were doing something different.

I is amazing how they made the right choice by using a non-mainstream language to develop their product, a product so well made that their costumers loved using it and paid for it so this just shows how important it is to use your knowledge to accomplish your goals and trust that if you use a great tool you will get a great product.

Lastly the most important part in the reading is that they made an evaluation of everything and they did chose lisp because it was the best option, obviously the y were both comfortable working on it but the important part is that they knew it was the best choice based on its design and everything it gave to their product, it made their decision easier and we all should try to do this in our projects.

The Semicolon Wars

As I started this major I always thought that even though there are many languages most of them have the same basic idea, a way in which to use loops, recursion, defining variables, etc. But as I started the programming languages course I found out that this wasn’t true, LISP is a whole new world, well not entirely new but it has several differences that make it visually quite different from let’s say python.

The idea behind the reading is that as you travel the world and learn a new language in the programming world it’s the same and it is crucial to know how to use and overall understand the other languages, this with the goal of using the best tools at your disposal while you work in different projects or ideas, even though python is a simple and easy language perhaps it wouldn’t work as well as c++ for data structures and this isn’t wrong, it is just part of using the correct tool for your goals.

There are many languages but as I mentioned earlier and is mentioned in the reading there isn’t a perfect language there are just correct languages for the correct situations and actually lisp is quite useful, the way in which it was designed facilitates many things and in some cases, it makes operations smaller by simplifying the way in which it operates.

I don’t really have a favorite language though I know how to use Java more than the others I hope to be able to learn new languages like lisp and to take advantage of the things they do better than java