13
Nov

Lisp @ Google: Killed in 2001 Reborn in 2008!

   Posted by: Emre Sevinc   in Lisp, Programlama

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First Erann Gat tried it to no avail:

“I did try to introduce Lisp to Google. Having had some experience selling Lisp at JPL I got all my ducks in a row, had a cool demo going, showed it to all the other members of the ads team, and had them all convinced that this was a good idea. The only thing left was to get approval from the VP of engineering. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I’d like to talk to you about something…
Him: Let me guess – you want to use Smalltalk.
Me: Er, no…
Him: Lisp?
Me: Right.
Him: No way.

And that was the end of Lisp at Google.”

However this is not the end of the story and saga continues. Here comes a young and bright researcher Dr. Moshe Looks, with his fresh Ph.D (check out his publications). under his belt, tackling the topic of some complex semantic machine learning problems using plop which is coded… yes, to no surprise, in Common Lisp! ;-) . You can read about plop in Google Research Blogs, too. Check it out:

“plop is a Common Lisp framework for experimenting with meta-optimizing semantic evolutionary search (MOSES) and related approaches to learning with probability distributions over program spaces based on:

* reduction to normal form
* representation-building
* deme (sub-population) management
* probabilistic model-building (aka estimation-of-distribution algorithms)”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Lisp, Programlama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

17 comments so far

Some one
 1 

Modernized lisp: Clojure

It’s amazingly inspiring. Try introducing it instead of the older lisps.

clojure.org

November 13th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
John Watts
 2 

LOL, Go Google! Google Rocks!

jess
http://web-anonymity.vze.com

November 13th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Eric
 3 

Hi,
Off topic, I know, but this is my first visit. Where did you get the theme for this site? Is it freely available?

November 13th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Emre Sevinc
 4 

Eric,

My current theme is a WordPress theme called Aspire v.1.1.4 by InfoCreek.com. It is freely available, check it out: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/aspire

November 13th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Emre Sevinc
 5 

Some one,

Thanks for pointing at Clojure. I’ve heard it many times and I wonder how it compares to e.g. SBCL. I don’t know if that plop project @ Google R&D would make use of Clojure.

November 13th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Paul
 6 

The fact that Java is one of Google’s big four languages might be a significant factor in Clojure’s favor there. Clojure not only is JVM hosted (i.e. compiles to JVM bytecode), but is touted to be a “great Java library consumer” as well.

November 13th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
jan
 7 

clojure is broken lisp. that is all.

November 13th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Some one
 8 

For many years, the lisps had all the language features and advantages that new languages only now start to offer. The three deterrents of lisp were: eccentric syntax, implementations which are incompatible on different platforms, lack of libraries.

Clojure eliminates completely the latter two and adds so much more. I highly recommend it.

November 13th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Bilbo
 9 

Clojure would be fine if it wasn’t on the JVM. No tail-call optimization? Hilarious.

November 13th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Justin
 10 

Scheme guarantees tail call optimization, LISP doesn’t and at least Rich Hickey though enough about the problem to provide recur which gives you constant stack space recursion means he has at least thought about the problem and come up with a solution

(defn fact [n accum] (if (zero? n) accum (recur (dec n) (* accum n))))

November 13th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Faried Nawaz
 11 

Bilbo, Common Lisp doesn’t have tail-call optimization either.

November 13th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
nocker
 12 

Aspire is nice. Port it over to drupal immediately.

November 13th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Zak
 13 

Most CL implementations will do tail-call elimination if you do tell the compiler to optimize space.

Clojure is not for everyone, but if you have an existing Java codebase or want easy concurrency, Clojure might be a good option.

November 13th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Emre Sevinc
 14 

One interesting fact: It seems that plop was implemented in C++ first. Now the programmer/researcher moved on to Common Lisp to reimplement it.

November 13th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
greenfield
 15 

Okay, maybe this is shallow…but why would you want to sully Lisp by marrying it to Java? Ick.

November 14th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Vincent
 16 

greenfield: it boils down to this: Clojure now has more quality libraries it can use than any Common Lisp implementation and it gets a world class garbage collector and JIT compiler for free.

I invite you to listen to the Boston Lisp presentation by Rich Hickey. It’s long (3 hours), but he explains everything about Clojure’s design to a Lisp crowd: http://clojure.blip.tv/

November 14th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
mcmax
 17 

Hmmm…Google now have on progress kernel with Base Lisp Engine but it’s start large work for write competitive Interface and Work is Restart from Simbolics.

September 9th, 2009 at 4:58 pm

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