I understand that some here have already started a project in a given language, and aren't going to change at this late date; this is addressed to those for whom it's still an open question.
The choice of language is said to not matter very much, and there are projects for which this is true. AGI is not among them, so I wrote up my thoughts on the matter in case they be of use to anyone. There turns out to be a website collecting perspectives like mine, so I posted it there: http://wiki.alu.org/Russell_Wallace%27s_Road_to_Lisp And copy below: I'm doing research in AI on the problem of procedural knowledge, which means dealing with (creating, debugging, reasoning about) program code. This entails dealing with code in parse tree form (other ways to specify computation turn out to be object code, so one way or another you end up coming back to the parse tree whatever the desired end product). This necessarily entails using Lisp if we define it in the broadest sense as the high-level language family that exposes the parse tree; the decision to make, then, is whether to use an existing dialect or invent one's own. So naturally, as hackers are wont to do, I chose the second option. And I was happy as a lark for a while, putting a lot of work into creating my own language, until in late summer 2008, compelled by repetitive strain injury to take a break, I thought a bit more about what I was doing. Okay, I thought to myself, instead of using an existing language that has a dozen mature, efficient implementations, thousands of users and extensive documentation, you're spending time you haven't got to spare on creating one that will have a single inefficient prototype implementation, one user and no documentation. And for what? A nicer syntax and ditching some historical baggage that isn't really doing any harm in the first place? Sharpen your wits, Russell. This is going to be a hard enough job even if you're smart about it. Making mistakes like this, you haven't a prayer. After that, the decision to use Common Lisp over Scheme was dictated by the fact that Common Lisp has the more comprehensive language standard, which makes it easy to port code (at least code that primarily performs computation rather than I/O) between implementations. The ability to defer the choice of implementation is a significant strategic advantage. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
