Markus Völter interviewed Dick Gabriel at OOPSLA 2007. Don't miss Dick's explanation of Lisp's EVAL! [via Mike Ajemian]

Dick initiated the idea of a Master of Fine Arts in Software and my recent experience with the software creation process, if you dare call it a process, in the financial industry indicates, we should make it mandatory for any software architecture position.

And in closing let me quote from Dick's essay The Art of Lisp & Writing:

Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer.

Links:

• Innovation Happens Elsewhere by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel
• Poem a Day project by Richard P. Gabriel
• Eternal Flame/God Wrote in LISP interpreted by Julia Ecklar
• The Art of Lisp & Writing by Richard P. Gabriel (the foreword to Successful Lisp by David B. Lamkins)
• Markus Völter's homepage

Reading Greg Linden's blog I realized that the technology I developed for medigist five years ago was an excercise in computational advertising.

Here's a project overview:

• Web-crawl a list of URLs and fetch new medical news content [Common Lisp]
• Clean up news using source specific filters and store into database [Common Lisp]
• Automatically tag news according to medical themes using a statistical text classifier [Common Lisp]
• Web subscription interface for medical topics [PHP]
• Manage advertising campaigns and related medical topics and upload PDF ads [PHP]
• Create monthly medical journal (PDF) for each user containing personalized news and ads [Perl, TeX]
• Track click-through rate for news and ads using a trampoline for each embedded article and ad [PHP]
• Do post analysis on click-throughs to improve content and ad selection for each user [Common Lisp]