Dick Gabriel on Lisp

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After listening to Dick Gabriel and his experience with Lisp, I can agree that Lisp is a functional language and this requires a different way of think than Object-Oriented Programming Languages. Lisp has a prefix notation, this means that a simple addition like 1 + 1 = 2, would be a (+ 1 1) in Lisp. You may ask, why do this operation that way? Well, because for the computer it is easier to parse the operation with a prefix notation because the operations are executed as they are read. Even though Lisp has been used for artificial intelligence, the main reason for Lisp's lack of usage is the learning curve which is high. 

I've heard of many programming languages, but I must accept that I haven't heard of Lisp nor Clojure before this course and this must be because of the few people that use them. There might be a few people using them, but these people are the ones who have a specialized way of thinking. 

Knowing Lips and its functionality will help you for having better programming practices, a clear example is macro, a macro is a program that creates programs by taking forms or objects as inputs and produces code to be then compiled and executed. 

Macros are not the only fascinating feature of Lisp, the way that Lisp is installed into computers is another amazing feature because Lisp installation makes the language to create itself and allows the user to modify or tune the language. 

As a conclusion, I can say that the fact that you don't know a programming language doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It is always good to know as many programming languages as possible because you don't know when you will need it. It would be good to learn programming languages as Dick suggest, as poetry, because in this way you can be more creative along with the programming languages features you will become a better programmer.

References: 

 - Episode 84: Dick Gabriel on Lisp, retrieved on August 30th, 2018 from: http://www.se-radio.net/2008/01/episode-84-dick-gabriel-on-lisp/

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