By Steve Sailer
10/25/2011
The Stanford computer scientist was 84. Some years ago, Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Some Heroes:
John McCarthy
John McCarthy invented [the programming language] 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.
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