I never really did a lot of Lisp but I did a ton of Forth back in the late 70's and early 80's. The languages have a lot in common. Especially the interactivity.
A good Forth environment was far and away the most interactive environment I have ever used. Why is this important? Well humans have two kinds of memory: short term and long term. See for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_memory Our short term memory is what we use in normal conversation and is good for less (perhaps a lot less) than a minute. Try having a conversation sometime when you pause between each word for 10 or 15 seconds. It is damn near impossible to do. Same with programming. There really are two kinds: The classical slow stuff that is taught in every university in the world; you know design, implement, test, etc. And the truly conversational exploratory approach which you can only get when the turn (guess, try, test ) is going on in a few seconds. Forth was the only environment that I found I could get into this conversational mode. I suspect good LIsp environments are the same but I did not really have access to them at the time. My main point is that most programmers have never really worked in such an interactive environment and don't even know what I am talking about. Too bad. It is damn good fun, which was one of the main attributes of Forth programming. On 1/7/07, Steven E. Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But Lisp's suitability for AI programming has little to do with these language features or libraries. It has more to do with the interactive and exploratory programming model most Lisps /can/ offer, now being aped by many current languages that offer a(n albeit restricted) interactive shell. But if you've never really programmed in a properly set-up Lisp environment, this won't make much sense to you. You can't appreciate something you've never imagined you could have.
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