Practical Common Lisp

Google TechTalks
May 10, 2006

Peter Seibel

ABSTRACT
In the late 1920's linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf hypothesized that the thoughts we can think are largely determined by the language we speak. In his essay "Beating the Averages" Paul Graham echoed this notion and invented a hypothetical language, Blub, to explain why it is so hard for programmers to appreciate programming language features that aren't present in their own favorite language. Does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis hold for computer languages? Can you be a great software architect if you only speak Blub? Doesn't Turing equivalence imply that language choice is just another implementation detail? Yes, no, and no says Peter...

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• lisp
• programming
• peter
• seibel
• common

[Ehal256]

why was 5 decades wasted on reinventing all the features that lisp pioneered in the 50's?

[emeka1978]

I wished i had learned Lisp before java. 

[psg12310001]

y am i watching this??!

[brianmtyler]

why in a talk on lisp, does the first 38 minutes only show java code, then totally fail to explain what the lisp syntax means when some finally appears appears?

[zhengyi13]

Interesting to hear this guy introducing his talk by recapitulating Sapir-Whorf...

[MrAbaza2222]

bla bla bla .......????!!!!!!!

[immak4u]

@UplandBill you dont have to buy the book. its free on the author's website: gigamonkeys (dot) com / book/

[immak4u]

the book is good. the presentation sucked. period.

[UplandBill]

If the book is anything like this presentation, then I don't think I will buy it.

[bcueflores]

@twiinStriing omg i love you

[ProgramaLauraDeTodos]

@MegaEdenvale Lisp is a family of programming languages, including Common LISP, Scheme and Clojure (to name a few). AutoLISP is a dialect of LISP.