I’ve been “interested” in AI since the 80s, but I never got around to learning Lisp or AI or doing anything serious about it until recently. I’m still not learning Lisp, though. Sadly, it is no longer the cool thing (if it ever was, I guess).
I’m a “Senior Software Engineer” for a Fortune 100 company in New England, so I have at least learned something about programming.
Hi @MichaelPaulukonis , actually the most used programming language in AI is Python, that is easy to learn and use. You will find lots of courses here.
I’m still not learning Lisp, though.
The modern version would be Clojure, derived from Scheme.
I took it up for a few months but then abandoned it, because, as in the original language, there is no typing anywhere in sight and you quickly wonder what the [redacted] you are doing or reading - even for code that you have written yourself recently.
This is also a problem with Python (which IMHO is just a horrible language and ugly syntax with multiple bad design decisions recognized ages ago and absolutely not made for teaching, that should have kept to its original goal: shell scripting - but then Google made it big). But at least you can use the type hints extension. Which I recommend taking up immediately. Sadly, the course leaves these out, maybe for “simplicity” (which the kind of simplicity where you tell a student in mathematics that all of the rules don’t matter, just vibe). I hope the timeline changes to something like Julia.
For languages other than LISP on the “Lambda Calculus branch” of programming, there is always the venerable ML, aka “meta language” and then OCaml, Haskell, Microsoft’s F# (I have to get into that). Go forth, young man.
I also recommend looking at Prolog, a forgotten marvel of logic programming (sadly still untyped, but there is Mercury]. I took me some time to understand it, and then understand it more as a constraint programming language over trees of values. SWI Prolog is nice for experimentation and real-world use and comes with additional features for constraint logic programming.
I’ve tried The Little Schemer more than once, but have never finished. Closest I got was working with Emacs and its weird awkward Lisp-y language. Sad to say, once I started working with VS Code I haven’t gone back to Emacs. There are a number of things that I do miss, but not enough to overcome the VS Code inertia.
Go forth, young man.
