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From: "James Albert Larson" <larso171@maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: Re: Why is Lisp inactive compared to Perl et al?
To: bhunter@cat.bbsr.edu
Message-ID: <20030.larso171@maroon.tc.umn.edu>
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Date: Sat, 6 May 1995 07:01:15 GMT
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Re: Lisp underappreciated 

I'm an engineer of 17 years experience.  Engineers are Fortran, Mathcad, 
spreadsheet, C types for the most part.  Me too.  I had heard of Lisp in an 
Artificial Intelligence context.  But as for applying AI to my problems at 
work, the conventional wisdom is buy an expert system shell, or get a 
neural network package (depending on the problem).  Neither has much to do 
with Lisp anymore.

I recently took several courses in Computer Science.  Included was a Lisp 
course, (Scheme).  I saw some interesting and powerful things.  But sort of 
hated it -- all they did was talk about recursion and being clever.

Then Mathematica was introduced in a course.  It has most of the Lisp 
features -- data = code = date, a list structure (so one can create 
whatever data structures one wants on the fly), anonymous functions, etc.  
Plus it has "pattern-matching" which I think is borrowed from Prolog.  And 
one can also write in the C procedural style.  

Anyway, the syntax of Mathematica was a lot easier to read.  I also did 
some Lisp - like things in Mathematica, and it helped a lot to clear the 
cobwebs I had when taking the Lisp course.  

Now I appreciate the easy exploratory nature of Mathematica and Lisp.  I 
want to tell my fellow engineers that its not just an "AI" language, but 
essentially a exploratory language for rapidly prototyping ideas for new 
algorithms to solve engineering problems.  

Jim Larson

