Friday, July 16, 2010: 6:00 pm (Bell): Being the second oldest high-level language still in widespread use (after Fortran), Lisp is often considered solely as an academic language well-suited for artificial intelligence. It is sometimes accused of having a (very (strange syntax)), only using lists as data types, being difficult to learn, using lots of memory, being inefficient and slow, as well as being dead, an ex-language. This talk, focusing on Common Lisp, aims to show that it is actually an elegant, unique, expressive, fast, extensible language for symbolic computation that is not difficult to learn and may even change the way you think about programming. Lisp is primarily a functional paradigm language, but supports object-oriented, imperative, and other programming models natively. Rapid prototyping, iterative development, multiprocessor development, and creation of domain-specific languages are all facilitated by Lisp. There will be a discussion of the origins and history of Lisp, followed by a demonstration of the language, features that migrated to and from other languages, and concluding with a look to what may be in store for the future.

Hosted by Adam Tannir