

Is there any evidence that lisp actually is better than other languages at AI? - joedavis512
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60028/is-there-any-evidence-that-lisp-actually-is-better-than-other-languages-at-artifi

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SlipperySlope
Let's look at some at current AI programs: (1) Robots, e.g. self drive cars.
In the DARPA grand challenge, the superior car-driving software was not Lisp.
Rather it was a procedural language such as C++ or Java. (2) Machine
translation of natural language. Lisp is not used for this purpose by widely
used production systems. (3) Game playing, e.g. chess programs. Lisp is not
used for this purpose by widely-used, superior chess programs such as Fritz.

Lisp was invented and developed by US AI labs in the 1960's in order to
rapidly prototype symbolic logic programs in which the native Lisp data
structures fit the level of symbolic abstraction required - e.g. English words
could be symbols in a list, logic formulas could be easily represented as
lists of operators and operands.

But for production programs, the software engineering advantages of static
typed languages and a wide variety of third-party libraries, means that Lisp
is not even considered for large modern systems that perform AI tasks.

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plinkplonk
this is a replica of Stephen Reed's answer from the stack exchange page. I
hope you _are_ Stephen Reed and not someone cutting and pasting a good answer
without attributing it.

