From: James Albert Larson
Subject: Re: Why is Lisp inactive compared to Perl et al?
Date:
Message-ID: <20030.larso171@maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Re: Lisp underappreciated
I'm an engineer of 17 years experience. Engineers are Fortran, Mathcad,
spreadsheet, C types for the most part. Me too. I had heard of Lisp in an
Artificial Intelligence context. But as for applying AI to my problems at
work, the conventional wisdom is buy an expert system shell, or get a
neural network package (depending on the problem). Neither has much to do
with Lisp anymore.
I recently took several courses in Computer Science. Included was a Lisp
course, (Scheme). I saw some interesting and powerful things. But sort of
hated it -- all they did was talk about recursion and being clever.
Then Mathematica was introduced in a course. It has most of the Lisp
features -- data = code = date, a list structure (so one can create
whatever data structures one wants on the fly), anonymous functions, etc.
Plus it has "pattern-matching" which I think is borrowed from Prolog. And
one can also write in the C procedural style.
Anyway, the syntax of Mathematica was a lot easier to read. I also did
some Lisp - like things in Mathematica, and it helped a lot to clear the
cobwebs I had when taking the Lisp course.
Now I appreciate the easy exploratory nature of Mathematica and Lisp. I
want to tell my fellow engineers that its not just an "AI" language, but
essentially a exploratory language for rapidly prototyping ideas for new
algorithms to solve engineering problems.
Jim Larson