Dick Gabriel on LISP


The first thing that comes to my mind after listening to a 60 minute podcast about LISP is how underrated and underused it is, I am really enjoying the simple way of programming from Clojure, but it is really important to learn the foundations where Clojure was founded, LISP is a purely functional language, which means everything is a function, and consequentially, everything returns something, although, this can be really useful, the main attractiveness for me about functional programming is that it doesn’t have side effects, meaning LISP is a really secure program, which means it can be trusted, sharing the responsibility of security along with the programmer.

An actual really interesting thing about LISP is the performance it has, one of the characteristics about this is prefix notation, which makes the operations easier to write (not necessarily meaning more readable) and easy to perform, also, one thing LISP can presume with other programming languages, is its support and usefulness it has had with artificial intelligence, thinking that LISP has been used to model real human-artificial models and prototypes is simply mind blowing.

Although LISP is really useful and efficient, one of the main problems is its learning curve,  being a not-so-easy to learn programming language can be a dead threat in this world full of other options, but I believe that LISP is more of a ‘influential’ language, meaning its usefulness doesn’t ends with the pure programming, it also has inspired multiple programming languages (Ruby) and is the main foundation of others (Clojure), LISP has present an actual real option besides OOP languages, and has started the war between scripting-functional and the so called OOP, the difference (main) between them is LISP has macros, which means you can increase the usefulness of the language, you are not tied to what the language developers had made or think.

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