Lisp

From AboveTheGarage

Lisp: "Lots of Individual Single Parentheses". I spent so many college years programming Lisp that I could spot mismatched parens from a yard away. I was talking to a fellow grad student at UC Irvine who was writing a neural simulator. It was written in Simula but it had a lot of parens. I couldn't concentrate on what he was saying because out of the corner of my eye I could see a mistmatched paren. Finally I had to ask him to fix it.

After I learned the basics of Lisp I switched to M-Lisp (Mock Lisp). Basically it was Lisp with an Algol like front end that made writing 'if' and 'while' loops easier. You could drop into Lisp anytime. I wrote the first version of the UCI Ada Interpreter in Lisp over a weekend. (That was a brilliant hack if I do say so myself.) My friend Steve Whitehill and I wrote some natural language parsing code that was based on "Conceptual Dependency". I wrote a fun program called "Pseudo-Steve" that you could ask questions about myself and the course I was teaching that summer.

Now I can't stand Lisp. Oh well. It was a blast at the time. And James Meehan, one of our professors, updated and maintained and enhanced our local version of Lisp, UCI Lisp, and was around to answer questions, which was terrific. So, yeah, fun at the time. I learned a lot about programming languages from Professor Meehan. I wonder what happened to him? I can't find any sign of him on the web.