Episode 74 - The Elegance of LISP

Advent of Computing

This is the conclusion to my exploration of why LISP is the "mother tongue of artificial intelligence". We pick up from the end of last episode and continue to cover the early days of AI. We follow the meandering path from the FORTRAN List Processing Language and IPL, up to pen-and-paper versions of LISP and into the first true implementation of the language. Along the way we will see just why LISP is called elegant, and how it was tailored for thinking machines. Selected Sources: https://sci-hub.se/10.1145/321021.321022 - FLPL http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59.pdf - Machines with Common Sense https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6096/AIM-008.pdf - AI Memo 8