LISP Comes of Age: The Language That Lets AI Think Like Humans
LISP Comes of Age (1980)
In August 1980, the first LISP conference drew nearly 300 attendees to Stanford, alongside the AAAI conference. Steven K. Roberts, reporting for Byte, captures the excitement and explains why LISP's extensibility and lack of function-data distinction make it uniquely suited for AI. Unlike rigid languages, LISP is a ball of clay that grows with the programmer, enabling heuristic knowledge and symbolic reasoning that traditional languages cannot handle.
APL has been compared to a diamond, which cannot be made into a larger diamond by the addition of a second one. LISP, in this context, is a ball of clay.
- dang
Related:
LISP Comes of Age - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025136 - Aug 2021 (7 comments)
Lisp Comes of Age (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22578824 - March 2020 (110 comments)
- so-cal-schemer
I'll always lament not grabbing a Xerox Alto for $50 from a SV thrift store at 15. I literally cried as we drove off. My dad turned around and it was already gone when we got back.
- fleeno
It was fun to realize this is the personal site of the BEHEMOTH bike creator, as seen at the Computer History Museum.