Does LISP Still Exist? AI, 5th & 7th Gen Computers

[Vivan Vatsa]

we are moving towards the 7th generation computer, but the 5th generation still exist in some part of the world. So talking about AI( artificial intelligence) does the programming language still exist, does LISP still exist or it is gone off the market?
Please help on this because I am learning programming languages & if lisp still exist then please let me know so that I can learn that to.P.s -- I am not aware of where to put this thread so please admins put this thread at the right place.
Thanks
Kind regards
Vivan

 

[berkeman]

we are moving towards the 7th generation computer, but the 5th generation still exist in some part of the world. So talking about AI( artificial intelligence) does the programming language still exist, does LISP still exist or it is gone off the market?
Please help on this because I am learning programming languages & if lisp still exist then please let me know so that I can learn that to.P.s -- I am not aware of where to put this thread so please admins put this thread at the right place.
Thanks
Kind regards
Vivan

When you do a Google search, what do you find?

 

[jtbell]

You might consider trying Scheme, a LISP variant developed at MIT:

https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/

A classic textbook, https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html by Abelson and Sussman, is based on Scheme.

More than 20 years ago, I had a student who did an independent study project using Scheme. We had a lot of fun with it, but I don't remember much now.

 

[fluidistic]

LISP is a dialect. Some of its languages have died whilst others aren't dead. Wikipedia gives a timeline about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language).
Personally, I see that #lisp channel in IRC is very active (there are other channels about lisp too), and I know some programs are still written in some lisp language (Maxima CAS comes to mind).
Here are the Clojure hot projects in github: https://github.com/trending/clojure.
You can try the other lisp dialects in github, too.

 

[Svein]

we are moving towards the 7th generation computer, but the 5th generation still exist in some part of the world. So talking about AI( artificial intelligence) does the programming language still exist, does LISP still exist or it is gone off the market?
Please help on this because I am learning programming languages & if lisp still exist then please let me know so that I can learn that to.

P.s -- I am not aware of where to put this thread so please admins put this thread at the right place.
Thanks
Kind regards
Vivan

If you are "learning programming languages", stay away from LISP. If you are going into AI and Expert systems, by all means learn LISP, but be aware that you cannot use LISP experience in what we call "procedural languages" (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1619834/difference-between-declarative-and-procedural-programming for definitions and examples).

 

[micromass]

I absolutely adore LISP. It's one of the most amazing programming languages out there. It was the first programming language I learned. I learned many after that, like C++, python, SAS, R, etc., but none of it comes close to the magic I felt when coding with LISP.

I highly recommend the book by Abelson and Sussman that @jtbell mentioned. I know it gets very mixed reviews, you either love it or hate it. I think it is because it takes a very theoretical, abstract and mathematical approach. That's of course exactly what I wanted, but maybe it's not something you want. If you want to use programming as a tool to create nice looking programs, then perhaps LISP and this book is not for you. Sure, what you learn in Abelson and Sussman isn't exactly practical knowledge. I doubt that in practice anybody would use LISP to solve a problem anymore. But the love of programming, the logic of programming, that's what it's about.

 

[D H]

If you are "learning programming languages", stay away from LISP. If you are going into AI and Expert systems, by all means learn LISP, but be aware that you cannot use LISP experience in what we call "procedural languages" (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1619834/difference-between-declarative-and-procedural-programming for definitions and examples).

I disagree, for several reasons. One is just semantics. It's better to say Lisp; it hasn't been called LISP for a long time.

More importantly, there is no one language called "Lisp"; Lisp is instead a family of languages. None of them are declarative languages. Some Lisps provide object oriented programming, most provide imperative/procedural capabilities. All are strongly functional.

Mastering functional programming techniques is a strong skill. Big data is very big on functional programming. In languages designed to be primarily functional (all Lisps, Scala, Haskell, ...), switching from one to another is a breeze. Many procedural languages (e.g., C++, Java, and C#) now offer functional programming capabilities. Python was originally designed to be a functional language with a bit of procedural capabilities as an add-on. It retains this flavor to some extent. If you want to get speed out of Python you should be using the functional side of the language. (This is particularly the case with numpy/scipy.) Ruby is similar, but it has even more of a functional flavor than does Python.

 

[fluidistic]

By the way, here's a list of Common Lisp softwares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Common_Lisp_software. (Again, note that Common Lisp is just a dialect of the Lisp family of languages).

 

[DrZoidberg]

I assume by "exist" you mean it is still in widespread use. If you want to learn every single language that is still in use you have a lot of work ahead of you. And there is no point to doing that. A handful of languages is more than enough for nearly every purpose.

 

[robphy]

Possibly useful / amusing / enlighening:
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index
"The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system."

 

[DrZoidberg]

The Tiobe index is completely unreliable. They don't even tell you how exactly they got their numbers.
If you want to decide what language to learn there are much better places to look.
You could count the number of job offers for specific languages, Or the number of projects on github. Or the posts on stackoverflow.

 

[D H]

Possibly useful / amusing / enlighening:
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index

One has to take ALL of these programming language indices with a grain of salt. There are a lot of people out there looking for jobs in computer science / computer programming / software engineering who would have been better off majoring in underwater basket weaving. This is why so many companies now give a fizzbuzz test to candidates.

Rankings based on search engine queries inherently suffer from a number of misleading effects such as the underwater basket weaving effect ("Help me write 'Hello World!' in X") and from the non-orthogonal language effect ("How do I to Y in X?"). Rankings based in github repositories are also seriously flawed. The uncountable number of "Hello World!" repositories (some of which can't even print "Hello World!") overwhelm the small number of serious, professional-level github repositories.

When one looks instead at how much people are paid, functional languages such as Erlang, Haskell, Clojure (a Lisp), Scheme (another Lisp), Common Lisp, and R tend to come out on top. Those jobs also tend to require candidates to know procedural languages, object oriented languages, query languages, and scripting languages as well as functional languages.

One needs to be a polyglot to survive in the modern world of programming.

 

[Svein]

It's better to say Lisp; it hasn't been called LISP for a long time.

Was it because of the sarcastic interpretation "Lots of Irritating Stupid Parenthesis"?

 

[DrZoidberg]

One has to take ALL of these programming language indices with a grain of salt. ...

How reliable do you think is this information?
http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?page=1&sortby=5&orderby=0&q=&id=900&lid=2618

 

[phinds]

There are a lot of people out there looking for jobs in computer science / computer programming / software engineering who would have been better off majoring in underwater basket weaving. This is why so many companies now give a fizzbuzz test to candidates.

Yeah, I had a set of questions that were moronically simple that I'd ask prospective programmers and it was depressing how many people couldn't answer most/all of them. The people who COULD answer all of them were a bit insulted that I would bother with such trivialities and I had to explain to them how many had no clue. One of the contracting companies I worked for was amazed that every hire I made was a good programmer whereas all the rest of their hiring managers had pretty poor results. I tried to get them to institute my methods but they would not and I found out later that it was because most of the hiring managers could not answer the questions and so did not feel comfortable asking them. Those managers were Project Managers (like me) but either had not come up through the ranks of programmers like me, or were themselves really bad programmers.

 

[D H]

How reliable do you think is this information?
http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?page=1&sortby=5&orderby=0&q=&id=900&lid=2618

As I said, one has to take ALL of these programming language indices with a grain of salt. Rankings based on ads are also suspect.

One reason employers need to resort to a fizzbuzz test is because too many people claim to have programming skills but cannot program their way out of a wet paper bag. The flip side also applies. Too many employers claim to need programmers but cannot run a project out of a wet paper bag. Those who can't advertise for jobs, all the time. Successful employers don't need to advertise nearly as much.