What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Katie Wasserman]

(07-06-2015 11:51 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  I see several people listed Lisp.

Did anyone do any actual programming projects using Lisp? If so, what was the project? I know it was used with AI, but I never really explored how it was used.

My undergrad AI course used LISP but the projects were all pretty simple. Later, when I got my PhD in AI all of that work was in LISP. This encompassed natural language processing -- reading patent abstracts in particular; representation of complex objects and learning to generalize about them. I wrote a lot of the code but not all of it, other grad students along with our adviser contributed parts of it.

When I started consulting on wall street almost all of that was in LISP too. The biggest project I did in LISP was a trading compliance system -- basically an "expert system" that allowed users to enter complex trading restrictions easily and have the system figure out how to interpret them and apply them.

In all of this, in addition to expert system-type schemes I used LISP to implement custom object-oriented environments. This was mind numbingly complicated code that often left me starching my head, and that was back when I was young and a lot smarter. I'm sure I would have no chance of understanding it now