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Lisp: The Strange Little Language That Helped Invent AI
Description
In this episode of The Agile Software Engineering Deep Dive, Alessandro Guida takes a historical and slightly playful look at Lisp - one of the strange little languages that helped shape the early world of artificial intelligence.
Long before AI became associated with Python, neural networks, GPUs, and large language models, artificial intelligence was also about symbolic reasoning, rules, lists, logic, search, and knowledge representation. Lisp was built for that world. Its focus on symbolic expressions, recursion, lists, and the close relationship between code and data made it a natural fit for early AI research.
This episode is not a call to abandon modern AI tools and return to 1960s programming. It is an invitation to understand where some of the deeper ideas in AI and software engineering came from - and why an old language full of parentheses can still feel strangely modern.
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