Good Reasons to Learn Lisp

You are strongly advised to (learn and) use Lisp if you intend to do any research in AI. Moreover, there are good reasons to learn Lisp even if you want to make it in the real world of e-commerce; see:

1. Paul Graham's Lisp Resources

2. St. Amant, Robert, & Young, R. Michael (2001), "Common Lisp Resources on the Web" (PDF), intelligence 12(3): 21-23.

3. ...and, especially,
   Graham, Paul (2001), "Beating the Averages".

If you decide to use Lisp: The implementation of Lisp for this course is Allegro Common Lisp (acl), which runs under the Unix operating system. You will be expected to learn the idiosyncrasies of Allegro Common Lisp on your own.

The best text is:

Shapiro, Stuart C. (1992), Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (New York: W.H. Freeman); isbn=0-7167-8218-9.

For more information on Lisp, see Marty Hall's "An Introduction and Tutorial for Common Lisp" website.