Today we are going to discuss the main topic of Dick Gabriel's podcast on Software Engineering Radio.
In this podcast he discusses the creation on Lisp in Stanford.
The topic I want to talk about is: Why functional programming is making a comeback into the software engineering field, and why it didn't do it before.
Having automatic garbage collection and a meta programming via lists on top of a compiler creates a big problem that only processing power solves: Overhead.
When Dick Gabriel invented Lisp, it was considered real slow to implement a program in Lisp. The amount of overhead per instruction is monumental to programs for architectures that handle RAM below 128 MB. Once we had the massive capacity of today's computing power, we can implement Garbage collection in whim, like in Erlang without over-extending our capacity of software.
It is also quite interesting to me that Lisp died down. For me one of the most important things that came out of Lisp is that everyone hates the parenthesis way of coding, Plenty of people have mentioned that they prefer Erlang to Lisp. A Parenthesis based structure also causes overhead to the programmer as he has to make sure that every parenthesis they make matches to another parenthesis.
Nowadays, it seems that the only implementations Lisp has is in very specialized web-apps that require meta-programming to be coded. It is quite interesting that you can code lisp in lisp, as Dick mentioned, but I wouldn't consider it an advantage over other programming languages.
One last thing that was very interesting is the notion that coding can be considered an Art. And the compatibility between writing literature and writing code. They both require a certain discipline to be executed correctly. With enough repetition and enough practice, you can achieve excellence in both according to Dick Gabriel.
[Podcast] Software Engineering Radio. Ep 84. Dick Gabriel on Lisp (2008) Listened on August 30, 2017. Retrieved from http://www.se-radio.net/2008/01/episode-84-dick-gabriel-on-lisp/