Evaluation
LISP completely dominated AI applications for a quarter century. Much of the cause of LISP’s reputation for being highly inefficient has been eliminated. Many contemporary implementations are compiled, and the resulting code is much faster than running the source code on an interpreter. In addition to its success in AI, LISP pioneered functional programming, which has proven to be a lively area of research in programming languages. As stated in Chapter 1, many programming language researchers believe functional programming is a much better approach to software development than procedural programming using imperative languages