Lisp inventor John McCarthy passes away

[Mr. Analog]

Another legend of Computing passes away...

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/10/24/2227204/john-mccarthy-discoverer-of-lisp-has-passed-away

[Darren Dirt]

"inventor" or "discoverer"?

...looks like slashdotters are on the same wavelength:

Discoverer of Lisp?

I think you mean creator or inventor. It's not like the Lisp programming language was just sat out in the wilds of Chile under a rock waiting to be found by an archaeologist.


The way some Lisp programmers gush over the language, you might get that impression. (Not that I have anything against Lisp or John.)


Yes, discoverer. Lisp is programming. And programming is math. Math is all around us... in the tree, the rock. Math surrounds us and binds us all together. Does this mean Lisp obeys the programmer? Partially, but the will of the math works through the programmer as well.

So death to software patents.

(how's that for an incomprehensible morning hours post?)

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/john-mccarthy-father-of-ai-and-lisp-dies-at-84/#disqus_thread

?[McCarthy] really encapsulated what computation meant,? says Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, pointing to modern languages like JavaScript and Python as Lisp?s successors. ?To some extent, that had been done before. People like Turing had a mathematical way of defining computing. But he was the first one to really put the essence of computing into a simple programming language, and that had a big effect on a lot of people.?

"Lisp Is Simply Perfect" 

PS: Paul Graham seems to be on the "discoverer" side:
http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html

It's worth understanding what McCarthy discovered, not just as a landmark in the history of computers, but as a model for what programming is tending to become in our own time. It seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model. These two seem points of high ground, with swampy lowlands between them. As computers have grown more powerful, the new languages being developed have been moving steadily toward the Lisp model. A popular recipe for new programming languages in the past 20 years has been to take the C model of computing and add to it, piecemeal, parts taken from the Lisp model, like runtime typing and garbage collection.

In this article I'm going to try to explain in the simplest possible terms what McCarthy discovered. The point is not just to learn about an interesting theoretical result someone figured out forty years ago, but to show where languages are heading.

http://www.paulgraham.com/heroes.html

John McCarthy invented Lisp, the field of (or at least the term) artificial intelligence, and was an early member of both of the top two computer science departments, MIT and Stanford. No one would dispute that he's one of the greats, but he's an especial hero to me because of Lisp.

It's hard for us now to understand what a conceptual leap that was at the time. Paradoxically, one of the reasons his achievement is hard to appreciate is that it was so successful. Practically every programming language invented in the last 20 years includes ideas from Lisp, and each year the median language gets more Lisplike.

In 1958 these ideas were anything but obvious. In 1958 there seem to have been two ways of thinking about programming. Some people thought of it as math, and proved things about Turing Machines. Others thought of it as a way to get things done, and designed languages all too influenced by the technology of the day. McCarthy alone bridged the gap. He designed a language that was math. But designed is not really the word; discovered is more like it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html

What Made List Different

When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages.

Lisp embodied nine new ideas:

1. Conditionals.
2. A function type.
3. Recursion.
4. A new concept of variables.
5. Garbage-collection.
6. Programs composed of expressions.
7. A symbol type.
8. A notation for code using trees of symbols.
9. The whole language always available

When Lisp was first invented, all these ideas were far removed from ordinary programming practice, which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s.

Okay, I'm convinced -- this guy was a freakin' genius and pioneer and true visionary, responsible for the very job that most of us are doing every day. Yeesh, I feel ashamed for not really knowing who he was or realizing how significant his contribution was to the field. 

[Darren Dirt]

some say John McCarthy was a math genius, others considered him a cunning linguist. :p(|)





:intriguing: Eric Raymond said...

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

via http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html <-- I wish I didn't find this essay, now I am seriously considering checking out this much-respected "legacy" language...