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> Sure we know what McCarthy developed Lisp for: as a tool for AI research. It's already mentioned in the very first paragraph of the 1960 paper on Lisp. > Sur
by imagist 10y ago
> Sure we know what McCarthy developed Lisp for: as a tool for AI research. It's already mentioned in the very first paragraph of the 1960 paper on Lisp.
> Sure there are several Lisp dialects and a bunch of derived languages, like Scheme.
Sure, that's one thing that it was when McCarthy started developing it, but the original Lisp paper doesn't say "only" and you don't know how McCarthy's intentions developed as the language developed.
> > Or put more tersely, I don't car.
> Yes, sure. car and cdr.
Hah! That was an entirely unintentional pun.
- lispm 10y ago> Sure, that's one thing that it was when McCarthy started developing it, but the original Lisp paper doesn't say "only" and you don't know how McCarthy's intentions developed as the language developed. McCarthy later did not care too much about Lisp development and direction himself, since he was working on core AI topics then. But the field of AI caused massive investment into Lisp during the 70s and 80s, until it died out in the early 90s. We are talking about something like 2 billion USD.
- imagist 10y agoUgh, when you say "Lisp" you're talking about "Common Lisp"? AI industry has invested into a lot of languages, including Scheme, but also including stuff like C++/Java/Python/Ocaml. Trivially Google has invested more in Python AI than $2 billion, and I wouldn't be surprised if Jane Street has invested more than that in OCaml AI. So I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove here.
- lispm 10y ago> Ugh, when you say "Lisp" you're talking about "Common Lisp"? When I say Lisp, I mean Lisp dialects: Maclisp, Interlisp, Standard Lisp, Franz Lisp, EULisp, Euslisp, LeLisp, ISLisp, Common Lisp, ... But not Scheme, Racket, Logo, Dylan, Javascript, Clojure, Ruby, Python, Mathematica, Perl, TCL, ...