From: Clint Hyde
Subject: RE: Is LISP really an artificial intelligence language?
Date:
Message-ID: <3ujjbk$dde@info-server.bbn.com>
In article <··················@protus.desertlinc.com> ······@protus.desertlinc.com (Aaron Hardinger) writes:
--> I was reading in some robotics books that LISP is a good reasoning and
--> desision making language. Could someone with experience tell me if this is so?
Lisp is a good language. period. it's extremely powerful.
to quote Ken Anderson "Lisp is it's own worst enemy", we were talking
about various aspects...
it is easy to work with because it allows you/the-programmer to get code
working extremely fast at the expense of that code being extremely
sloppy (or perhaps not, depending on your level of expertise).
--> Also is LISP easy or real complicated to learn?
both. if you start by reading the "bible" (Common Lisp The Language, by
Guy Steele, 2nd edition), it will feel extremely complex. if you start
by reading "The Little Lisper" it will feel easy. the syntax, although
unusual, is extremely clean and simple (although there are ways to make
it hard, they are shortcuts to supposedly make it easier).
if you start with Winston & Horn, and in-between text, I don't know, I
haven't read that since first edition, which I thought wasn't great.
I found it easy to learn. I also found that it really changed how I
thought about programming. I couldn't write good Fortran afterwards :)
(ok, some joker will question whether I could before either, but I was
actually pretty good with fortran)
ultimately, though, you have to read Steele2. no substitute for that.
and then a year or two later you have to read it again. and again.
what Lisp is is a *fun* language. you don't have to waste time doing
lots of silly declarations of things, you just use them. it's got a
zillion functions built in, so you don't have to try to remember what
dang library they're in, which header-files to include, blah blah blah.
it's easy to be sloppy, and that can be hard to clean up later--just
adding declarations won't fix the problem. performance enhancements can
be extremely subtle. but the tools can be extremely powerful.
is Lisp an AI language? it's been used that way...but it's been used for
lots of other stuff too.
I've been programming for 20 years (lisp for > half that time), and it
is by far my favorite language.
-- clint