Dick Gabriel on Lisp

Welcome back  everybody. In this week's blog we'll dive right into one of the most known figures in the functional programming world, Dick Gabriel. He is known for his work in the Lisp programming language and in this podcast he tells us more about this language and why now more than ever it could be of great usage in the software engineering industry. 

There are a few things that we know at first glance when talking about Lisp, it's been around for some time now, it has evolved from what it once was and we now see it in different variations such as Clojure. To be honest, before listening to this podcast I still could not fully understand the extent of  the functionality and power Lisp has. Firstly, I was able to understand the process of builiding a program or system with an analogy that he used during the podcast. It can be viewed kind of like live programming, building a city, incremental and when it first started there was the task at hand to write programs that were new and that pretty much no one knew how to write. 

I'm still not sure how this would work applied to a real time application or how you can build an entire system from the ground with Lisp, but I know that it's something that has been done. It's pretty admirable to see what Dick Gabriel has done for the computer science community, being one of the pioneers. 

It's truly wonderful to hear experts in this industry talking about the evolution of how we create systems and how much it has changed over the years, what's most fascinating is the fact that they talked about all this with excitement for what's to come in the future. It's clear to me that we are only scratching the surface of all the potential we have.

 

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