Dick Gabriel on Lisp

At the beginning, Dick told us his background, and it surprised to me, that he said he have some mathematical degrees and one in artificial intelligence, because last semester at my algorithm’s analysis class our professor Salvador E. Venegas said us that something beneficial for an engineer was, to “get the full package”, because there was always engineers that need to study mathematics in order to advance in their jobs, because the understanding of mathematics reduced the complexity of developing algorithms. I didn’t know Lisp has an interpreter instead of a compiler, something interesting because as I know it reads and traduce the program line per line, instead like the hole program first, as the compiler do. I didn’t understand well how the meta part of “eval” work, what I understood was that “eval” work in certain way as recursion. The “common Lisp” is interesting, how Lisp started to get “subdivisions” in different ways to get closer to user’s needs gave Lisp variety and trying to get all these together gave Lisp more power. “Lisp was the Java for programmers at mid-1980’s”, as the podcast explained at this part and as I understood, this is because as nowadays with java, lisp have “special features”, as the portability of Java, Lisp had the possibility to develop “extensions” to satisfy special needs. Rubi was maybe influenced with meta programming, Java acquired the garbage collection as Lisp. Finally, I think is interesting how Lisp is still working in certain way, as Dick said, there are some companies that still work with Lisp and develop algorithms, and work with open source-code, and how Lisp adapted the object-oriented paradigm with CLOS, this was a result of experimenting with Lisp trying to relate the functional programming with object-oriented programming, and decided to do it through the “messaging passing”.