🚀 go-pugleaf

I don't think there's a good answer to that question Peter, at least not
a short one. LISP was certainly one of the earliest and most influential
AI languages, but then again in the early days of AI, LISP was also one
of the few existing languages. If I'm not mistaken it was developed by
an AI researcher (Minsky?) for AI programming, among other things. Since
that time, programming languages, and the study of them, has progressed
significantly. As a result, the choice of what language to use is often
determined by the task at hand (i.e. for certain combinatorial problems
you may want to use prolog or LISP), the platform on which it will run
(perhaps Java if you require platform independence), the temporal
constraints (C and C++ are much faster than Java) etc. In some circles
LISP is still widely, or even exclusively, used. Usually this occurs
where rule-based AI is being developed, although Randall Beer's early
work on artificial cockroaches was also done in LISP I believe. In other
circles a variety of languages may be used, in fact different modules
for the same program might be coded in different languages.

Anyway, whether you are "hopelessly out of date" depends almost entirely
on who you are talking too and what project you are discussing. OK well,
I suspect I've blathered on WAAAAaaay to long here.

Take care,
Lew

PeterS wrote:
> 
> I thought LISP was the lingua franca  of AI - am I hopelessly out of date?
> 
> steve@tropheus.demon.co.uk wrote in message ...
> >On Thu, 27 Apr 2000 16:16:36 -0700, Seth Russell <seth@robustai.net>
> >wrote:
> >
> >>j wrote:
> >>
> >>> >Forth is the lingua franca of AI, embedded NC and robotics.
> >>> >For details on Mind.Forth and the public domain AI project,
> >>> >see the ACM Sigplan Notices 33(12):25-31 (December 1998),
> >>> >"Mind.Forth: Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence and Forth."
> >>>
> >>>    Too bad that FORTH is such an awful anachronistic
> >>>    language. Nobody thinks in stacks ...  :-)
> >>
> >>Bull shit!  Everybody thinks in stacks.
> >
> >Some of the diagrams on your own web site would be very difficult to
> >reduce to stacked thoughts. Objects and links, not stacks.
> >
> >
> >Steve
> >--
> >
> >Steve Wolstenholme
> >Neural Network Applications for Windows
> >http://www.tropheus.demon.co.uk