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A Lifetime in Lisp


IBM distinguished engineer believes Eisenhower-era language is a good on-ramp for teaching threaded programming

By Alex Handy
September 15, 2007 — 
Although bobby socks and Edsels are safely in the past, a classic programming language may be making a comeback.

In 1972, Richard Gabriel found himself tasked with the job of making a video camera move according to programmed actions. The project was created inside MIT's AI Lab, where Gabriel was then a student, and in order to accomplish this task, he was forced to learn Lisp. A Fortran programmer prior to this, Gabriel found himself learning to program in a language that would come to be a part of his life for the next 35 years and beyond. Along the way, he discovered that Lisp offered numerous benefits to students and first-time programmers—benefits that are still not available anywhere else, even though Lisp was first specified almost half a century ago, in 1958.

Today, Gabriel works at IBM, recently joining the company as a distinguished engineer. In this capacity, he said that he's noticed a recent upswing in Lisp usage in Europe. The language remains popular among researchers, especially those working with artificial intelligence, said Gabriel. But despite the language's age, there are even some groups in Europe that use Lisp as the back end for Web sites, he said.

But Gabriel sees another place where Lisp can help in modern computer society, as one of the oldest languages to incorporate a threaded programming model. This, combined with Lisp's generally obvious syntax, means that Lisp is a great first language for budding computer scientists.

Gabriel spent a great deal of his career working with such students, both at MIT and at Stanford University. He noted that, in the 1980s, a great deal of work was done around multithreaded Lisp programs. “The actual models used back in the day and the ones used today are pretty darned similar. One difference is that in the Lisp world, the types are attached to objects at runtime, so you don't have to be as wordy in describing the types to the compiler,” said Gabriel.

“A lot of what gets in the way of the students is confusing the concepts with all of the verbiage you have to put in to make the compiler happy,” he added. “When people are teaching something as complex as the language of a threading model, students get confused worrying about thread types, when they should be worried about what threads are doing, and how are they locking.”

Unfortunately, Lisp and its close relative, Scheme, are no longer in favor at universities around the country. “I saw a list in 1989, of 600 or so schools teaching Scheme as their introduction to programming course. That dissipated fairly dramatically in the 1990s, starting with Java. The object-oriented languages took over that introductory role,” said Gabriel, pointing out that Logo was also displaced during this time.

It was an unfortunate turn of events, said Gabriel, but one likely due to the highly unique Lisp syntax. “Any language that is light on the syntax and that has some sort of visual feedback, like Logo's turtles, are the simplest [to teach]. Lisp-like languages are very spare.” Students found it difficult to make the transition to Java or even C, Gabriel explained, because “the syntax was so different from other languages, even though [students] could get the concepts right away.”


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