What is LISP?
When I first started reading I knew that Lisp is a programming language. But I don’t know more things about it. So I decided to investigate a little about it before I read the whole essay. Lisp is actually a family of programming languages. It is the second oldest high level programming language, Fortran is just one year older.
Standardization
One of the things that Lisp did right was it’s ability to became standardized. This effort started wy back in the early 80’s. There were efforts to make a standard version of Lisp even outside the US.
Good Performance
Many Common Lisp implementations have multitasking and non-intrusive garbage collection. This made Lisp very competitive in terms of performance. These features were regarded as impossible on stock hardware ten years ago. Lisp was competitive even to C.
Good Environments
In this essay. The case is made that modern programming environments are a result of the Lisp and AI tradition. Some of the examples listed on the essay are: the first bit-mapped terminals, the mouse pointing device, full-screen text editors, and windowed environments. These all came from laboratories engaged in AI research.
Good Integration
C, Pascal and Fortran can be invoked from Lisp code. Likewise, these programs can invoke Lisp. Such interfaces allow the programmer to freely mix foreign and Lisp functions.
Object-oriented Programming
According to this essay Lisp has the most powerful object-oriented extensions of any language. One can do things such as multplie inheritance that Java can’t do but C++ can. It has First-class classes and First-class generic functions. Along with a lot of other features. The author predicted that this Lisp will be the first standardized object-oriented programming language.
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