- First name: 
  
Christopher 
  
- Last name: 
  
Riesbeck 
  
- Email address: 
  
REMOVED
  
- Home page: 
  
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~riesbeck/ 
  
- Phone number(s): 
  
847 491-3500 
  
- Postal code: 
  
60201 
  
- City: 
  
Evanston, IL 
  
- Country: 
  
USA 
  
- Organization(s) you work for or study at 
 (please supply the name and city for each organization): 
  
Computer Science Department, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 
  
- Fields of interest 
 (e.g. computer linguistics, numerical analysis, business software, 
  medicine, bioinformatics): 
  
educational environments, artificial intelligence 
  
- Have you written any Lisp-related papers? If so, please supply 
 bibliographical references (and URL's, if possible). 
  
Books with substantial amounts of Lisp code included: 
  
Artificial Intelligence Programming, Second Edition. 
E. Charniak, C. Riesbeck, D. McDermott, and J.R.Meehan. 
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987. 
  
Inside Case-Based Explanation. 
Written and edited by R. Schank, A. Kass, and C. Riesbeck. 
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  (1994). 
  
Inside Case-Based Reasoning. 
Written and edited by C. Riesbeck and R. Schank. 
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  (August, 1989). 
  
Inside Computer Understanding. 
Written and edited by R. Schank and C. Riesbeck. 
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981. 
  
- Have you developed or participated in the development of any 
 Lisp-related programs or libraries? If so, please supply a URL, 
 if possible. 
  
I've been teaching Intro AI Programming at Northwestern since 1989. 
The class code library and documentation can be found at 
  
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/academics/courses/325/ 
  
- Lisp variants you have used (e.g. Common Lisp, Scheme, Dylan): 
  
Common Lisp, Scheme, UCI Lisp, T 
  
- Lisp variants you're currently using or intend to use in the 
 near future: 
  
- Lisp implementations you have used 
 (e.g. CMUCL, Lispworks, Allegro Common Lisp): 
  
Macintosh Common Lisp, Allegro Common Lisp, Lispworks, XLisp 
  
- Lisp implementations you're currently using or intend to use 
 in the near future: 
  
Allegro Common Lisp, Lispworks 
  
- Computer platforms on which you're using or deploying Lisp: 
  
Windows 
  
- Number of years of experience with Lisp: 
  
34 
  
- Do you use Lisp: 
 - at work (if so, how much) 
 - for study (if so, how much) 
 - as a hobby (if so, how much) 
  
75% of my coding is for web-based educational systems, and that's in Java/XML/Javascript 
the other 25% is for teaching AI, and that's half Lisp and half Java 
  
- Are you using Lisp as much as you would like to? 
 If not, why not? 
  
No. In the world of educational web applications, your project lives 
or dies by the ability and willingness of university IT departments 
to deploy and maintain what you build. Compared to Java, Lisp isn't 
even on the radar. 
  
- Do you see any obstacles to further Lisp growth (if so, what 
 is the biggest obstacle in your opinion)? 
  
No language mechanism for saying what API code implements, comparable 
even to something as weak as Java's interfaces. Without that, you 
can't construct applications from libraries with any stability over 
library updates or replacements. 
  
- Would you be interested in a Lisp-related job or contract work? 
  
- Is your organization interested in hiring Lisp programmers? 
  
- Are you currently participating in Lisp-related meetings? 
 If so, where and how often? 
 If not, would you be interested in such meetings?