Hacker News Reader

It is especially well-suited for applications in AI...

<Groan>. I wish people would stop putting "lisp" and "AI" in the same sentence. How many decades did lisp languish because people thought there was no reason to learn it if they weren't doing AI?

View on HN

And from the other side, how many decades was AI approached from an ineffective direction because it was assumed that Lisp was good at it?

Your thesis here is that Lisp itself was a limiting factor in AI research? What alternate language/direction would have resulted in substantially more progress?

I'm not Miky, but I interpreted his statement to be that doing AI is a whole heck of a lot more complicated than just using an introspective, code-as-data, data-as-code language.

LISP is a hammer in an AI researcher's toolbox. Human-level AI is a monumental skyscraper undertaking. For sure, any construction team would be hard-pressed to build the Empire State Building without the proper tools, but there's a lot more to it than that.

Has there been any measurable progress in actual AI since, well, ever?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com