John McCarthy, Discoverer of Lisp, Has Passed Away

RIP and thank you for AI by noobermin · 2011-10-25 00:09 · Score: 1

How different the world of IT would be without these computer giants. Farewell and thank you!

Re:RIP and thank you for AI by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 00:49 · Score: 4, Informative

Hm....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replanning_Tool
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHINE_Expert_System

Yeah, this language is useless outside of academia.

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Palm trees and 8
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by icebraining · 2011-10-25 00:57 · Score: 1

I know the temptation is strong, but don't feed the trolls, please.

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Re:RIP and thank you for AI by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 01:00 · Score: 1

I am not certain that it was a troll. For some reason, a lot of people seem to view Lisp the way the poster described: an academic language that does not live up to its promise in the real world.

Or maybe I was trolled so hard that I do not know what hit me.

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Palm trees and 8
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by johnjaydk · 2011-10-25 01:06 · Score: 2

LISP however is a nightmarish construct made to entertain academics with academic constructs, which it may do exceedingly well, but for practical real-world applications the usefulness of LISP is long gone if it ever existed beyond a rudimentary level.
I steadfastly held the same view that only academic wienies had any use for Lisp or even worse Scheme. It took me some 15 years to see the light but now I work exclusive in Lisp and Scheme.
Languages are NOT created equal and the challenges we face now needs more powerful languages. That is where Lisp and Scheme come into their own. I think, I'll look into Haskell next. Another language that I previously wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
Time is a great teacher although it tends to kill all it's students

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Re:RIP and thank you for AI by sycodon · 2011-10-25 01:07 · Score: 2, Funny

Well, to be fair he only "Discovered" it, he apparently didn't create it. I wonder who actually created it and then just left it lying around for him to "discover"?

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Re:RIP and thank you for AI by Darth+Snowshoe · 2011-10-25 01:30 · Score: 1

Scheme is foundational to a lot of current ASIC design tools. Lisp was the root of a lot of early AI development.
God bless and thanks - RIP.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by pnewhook · 2011-10-25 01:31 · Score: 1

I think, I'll look into Haskell next
Have you tried Prolog? There's an art to that language..

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Re:RIP and thank you for AI by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 01:32 · Score: 1

Perhaps prolog-in-lisp?

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Palm trees and 8
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by durrr · 2011-10-25 01:37 · Score: 1

I was serious although I might've worded it somewhat provocative. The DART example is impressive, the SHINE also.
I don't however find anything detailing why LISP was chosen for any of the projects, was it because LISP have some inherent advantage for the specific applications, or because the projects were started during a time when everyone was told that LISP was the holy grail of programming and it was just the obvious thing to do?
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by durrr · 2011-10-25 01:43 · Score: 1

I hope you see the problems with a programming language that requires a spiritual ascension after a decade+ journey?
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by stanlyb · 2011-10-25 01:57 · Score: 1

Autocad, Graphtalk, just to mention two BIG examples of using the LISP language.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by ddegirmenci · 2011-10-25 01:58 · Score: 1

It was always there in itself, from where we, the nature and the whole universe came. It lies within us.
Oblig.: http://xkcd.com/224/
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:01 · Score: 0

Time is a great teacher although it tends to kill all it's students
+1
and new generations are trying desperately to re-invent/re-discover fundamental truths in a half assed way. :(
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by DannyO152 · 2011-10-25 02:02 · Score: 1

The standard answer is that homoiconicity and functions as first-class objects combine powerfully and result in fewer lines of code. There were problems with inefficiency of its data structures and, as I've read Rich Hickey explain, the list, an implementation, instead of the sequence being the abstraction. Hickey started clojure, which is proudly a Lisp, and it was a choice and not a nod to the flavor-of-the-month.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 02:04 · Score: 2
I don't however find anything detailing why LISP was chosen for any of the projects, was it because LISP have some inherent advantage for the specific applications, or because the projects were started during a time when everyone was told that LISP was the holy grail of programming and it was just the obvious thing to do?
Well, there are a few reasons that come to mind:
1. AI projects often involve AI researchers, and Lisp was a popular language in AI research.
2. Lisp macros have the full power of the language -- this allows programmers to do a lot of interesting things with macros, like extending the syntax and lexicon of the language to meet arbitrary needs.
3. Until recently, Lisp had features that were very rare in more commonly taught programming languages: lambda expressions, lexical closures, multiple dispatch, etc. This is beginning to change now (even C++ has lexical closures), but some of the projects I pointed out were written years ago when that was not the case. Although the need for some of those features is pretty rare -- I do not commonly need multiple dispatch -- when those features are needed, they can really help programmers express what they want the program to do.
4. Lisp developed environments were years ahead of other IDEs for a long time. For large projects like DART, I suspect that made a significant difference.
5. Extensibility -- I mentioned that Lisp macros can be used to extend the language, but it is also the case that compiled Lisp programs often include a Lisp interpreter, so Lisp can be used as a Lisp program's own extension language. This gives the users all the power that the programmers had (see above about features and macros). These days, this seems less impressive, since plenty of languages support this.
Now, to be fair, there were a lot of broken promises made by Lisp vendors in the 80s, back when AI was supposed to be the future of computing. It is likely that at least some projects were written in Lisp with the hope that some advanced AI would swoop in and do all sorts of magic. Still, Lisp can stand on its own merits, without anyone pushing snake oil on developers.
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Palm trees and 8
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 02:06 · Score: 1

* Lisp development environments.

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Palm trees and 8
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by Medievalist · 2011-10-25 02:17 · Score: 2

Languages are NOT created equal and the challenges we face now needs more powerful languages. That is where Lisp and Scheme come into their own. I think, I'll look into Haskell next. Another language that I previously wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
All turing-complete languages are equally capable, eh? You can create abominations and masterpieces in nearly any language.
Programmers, however, tend to work best in a language that suits their unique preferences and abilities. No language is inherently better than all others, for all people, because people are not interchangeable featureless units. Some people are OK with monkey-patching, even.
Personally, I like to create code that other people can build on and maintain, rather than writing myself into a permanent maintenance position. That kind of rules out Lisp, since nobody else wants to maintain it - among computer languages, popularity is a feature, and lack of popularity is a bug.
Condolences to Mr. McCarthy's family and friends.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by tibit · 2011-10-25 02:18 · Score: 3, Interesting

I know zip about other projects, but I was hacking on Maxima for use in my robotics assignments and something is to be said for conciseness of Lisp's way of dealing with data structures. Something more is to be said for macros: the programmatic generation of code (they are nothing like C macros). Of course you can generate code in C, but it's a shitty experience, and you have to roll it all yourself. The C/C++ languages do not come with any sort of a data structure to express themselves. Even Python has an ast module. I've found that programmatic generation of code is a big win in embedded world, especially on small microcontrollers (RAM in single kilobytes, etc). Most platform libraries become quite bloated if you want to truly fully support all peripherals, even if a typical application only uses a small subset of the functionality. The compilers are usually too stupid to properly optimize it, even if a fairly rudimentary constant propagation would indicate that 90% of the library is dead code. With macros you can easily generate just the code you need. Macros can easily and cleanly replace external tools like lexer and parser generators. They are also great for implementing extra language features. You don't need hacks like Duff's device or coroutine horkage. LISP is powerful enough that you can have features like yield implemented in a library.
In the end, it's all about ease of use. Even though I do a lot in C and C++, I detest their verbosity. I mean, come on, ML family had type inference for three decades! Heck, I have worked with a structured basic running on CP/M Z80 that had rudimentary type inference (although didn't have algebraic types). You didn't have to assign types to your variables, and if you tried adding an integer to a string it would balk -- not at runtime, but before it'd accept the new or modified line of program! Variables were assigned types at first use, and if you had a function returning a value (yes, it had functions, but sadly no tuples), it knew what type it'd be based on the code inside of the function. That was in late 80s! Then you come to C++ and get to experience template metaprogramming -- sure it's powerful, but it feels about as expressive as programming a Turing machine directly. And metaprograms are interpreted by the compiler, in a very inefficient way.

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A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by cpghost · 2011-10-25 02:29 · Score: 1

Not to forget Axiom.

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cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by johnjaydk · 2011-10-25 02:59 · Score: 1

Turing-complete is not the point. Abstraction and leverage is the point. Assembly language is also Turing-complete and the reason we don't use it much is exactly the same. Productivity in assembly sucks.

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Re:RIP and thank you for AI by johnjaydk · 2011-10-25 03:07 · Score: 1

I hope you see the problems with a programming language that requires a spiritual ascension after a decade+ journey?
+5 Funny
C++ and Java were perfect for the challenges we faced 15 years ago but they have run out of steam now and complexity is threatening to overwhelm us again. Therefore I'm looking for a bigger hammer with more leverage to gain more productivity.
The spiritual ascension is entirely optional.

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TCAP-Abort
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:34 · Score: 0

Wow, you really no nothing about computer science, do you?
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by Medievalist · 2011-10-25 03:38 · Score: 1

Productivity in lisp sucks too, for most people.
I understand your point; I mean no disrespect to lisp or haskell. Do you get my point?
PHP beats lisp in number of real-world deployments earning money and eyeballs. Does that mean PHP is better? No, it means more people know how to use it. (Cue the PHP haters now, I guess.)
If I write ten thousand lines of lisp, I'll be the maintenance programmer for that code for the rest of my career. Nothing but adding the new feature-of-the-week for PHBs - no thanks!
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by jbolden · 2011-10-25 03:55 · Score: 1

Absolutely LISP ideas like automated garbage collection, automatic typed variables and recursion have had no impact on real world computing.
And I would imagine things like: higher level function, automated memoization and self modifying code are unlikely to be major players in the next generation given their impact on Scala, C#/Linq, F#, new SQL standards....
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by jbolden · 2011-10-25 03:59 · Score: 1

Haskell is amazing. The big plus is most of the power of LISPs (and arguably more in a few areas) with much easier to write code and and debugging being easier.
Further Haskell forces you to use LISP constructs and break bad habits for other languages. LISP is functional. Haskell is purely functional. So you will lose those old imperative habits.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by jbolden · 2011-10-25 04:00 · Score: 1

Which is what exactly?
Besides there are LISPs, like Logo that are taught to 5 year olds and the 5 year olds get them and do useful things with them.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by jbolden · 2011-10-25 04:02 · Score: 1

It depends on your environment. LISP like languages are getting more popular, Clojure is semi in. And certainly LISP influenced languages like Scala or F# are doing much better than a decade ago.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by jbolden · 2011-10-25 04:05 · Score: 1

It really wouldn't be the same thing. If you were to write 10,000 lines of LISP code you would be redefining the way the application works. It would like be a system and the configuration system (which plays the role of the PHP) would live on top of that.
You wouldn't replace 10,000 lines of PHP with LISP. You would more likely be replacing at least part of the web server, the database layer, the object relational mapper... with 50,000 lines of LISP and creating a fully custom application.
Re:RIP and thank you for AI by Creepy · 2011-10-25 06:55 · Score: 1

I remember several features of languages like Lisp being hard (if not impossible) to implement without a runtime interpreter. I believe garbage collection (which was also invented by Lisp inventor John McCarthy), was one of them, though I'm a bit foggy on the details of why. I know gc exists for C/C++, but not for all data types (notably unions) and it tends to be unreliable. Bjarne Stroustrup doesn't think garbage collection is necessary for the most part, though he acknowledges there are some that could use it, and said in an interview that C++ is the least garbage generating language (because the programmer cleans it up?).
Despite my dislike of Lisp as a language, which I call parenthesis hell (In my AI class I had a function with ~85 close parenthesis on a 40 column display due to a large nested function for God's sake...) I admit there are many features I like, but I got swept up in the OOP bandwagon when I learned Smalltalk and C++ at about the same time (and C++ got just about everything wrong, but it was much faster and that is what the world wanted at the time).

let this be a lesson to you by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:09 · Score: 0, Funny

lisp will reduce your life expectancy.

Re:let this be a lesson to you by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:20 · Score: 1

He was 84. The life expectancy for US males is 76.
Re:let this be a lesson to you by Tsingi · 2011-10-25 00:29 · Score: 1

He was 84. The life expectancy for US males is 76.
And dropping.
Re:let this be a lesson to you by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:43 · Score: 3, Insightful

lisp will reduce your life expectancy.
Nothing will reduce your life expectancy more than doing template metaprogramming in c++.
LISP is the king of all computer languages. Its influence is still being felt 50 years after its creation, and people are rediscovering features that good ol' lisp has had since the begining.
Re:let this be a lesson to you by loufoque · 2011-10-25 07:42 · Score: 1

On the contrary, template meta-programming in C++ is hot and trendy, it makes you feel young again.
Re:let this be a lesson to you by hazah · 2011-10-26 02:33 · Score: 1

Not to mention that at the end of the day, it has its uses too.

Discoverer or Lisp? by agentgonzo · 2011-10-25 00:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by davidbrit2 · 2011-10-25 00:16 · Score: 1

The way some Lisp programmers gush over the language, you might get that impression. (Not that I have anything against Lisp or John.)
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by erroneus · 2011-10-25 00:19 · Score: 4, Funny

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?)
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by sapphire+wyvern · 2011-10-25 00:21 · Score: 5, Funny

Actually, the natives of Lisp already knew all about it. McCarthy was just the first person to show up with a flag, guns, germs & steel to claim Lisp for his homeland's empire.
So you're quite right... discoverer is a very patriarchal, hegemonic colonialist way of describing McCarthy. /leftist historian mode :P
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by mapkinase · 2011-10-25 00:21 · Score: 1

I have an impression that some of the modern languages might have been found in that way...

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Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by vlm · 2011-10-25 00:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
He was an old time computer scientist, publications with titles like "A basis for a mathematical theory of computation". Hard core math.
Philosophically, you don't "create" or "invent" math you discover it. Logical concepts exist independent of who wrote a paper about them first. Take two 256 bit random prime numbers, multiply them, and you have not "created" or "invented" the result but merely discovered it, or rephrased discovered its two factors.

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Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by moderatorrater · 2011-10-25 00:24 · Score: 1

You discover new math. You invent notation. Programming languages are the latter.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by theVarangian · 2011-10-25 00:26 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.
Actually Lisp is just one of the many languages heavily influenced by Lambda calculus which was introduced by Alonzo Church back in the 1930s and 40s. Back then Lamda calculus it was just another system in mathematical logic that only a few mathematicians and logicians knew or cared about. So in a sense John McCarthy did find it under a rock although not in the wilds of Chile but rather in a scientific paper.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by tuffy · 2011-10-25 00:28 · Score: 2

The idea is that he discovered Lisp could be assembled from seven primitive operators, from which the rest of the language could be built. Though I agree that "discoverer" is a bit of a stretch.

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Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:29 · Score: 0

Agreed. The lambda calculus was discovered. Lisp was created.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:31 · Score: 0

Fingernail clippings have existed for ages. He was the first to discover that they were actually software.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:34 · Score: 0

Didn't you know that Lisp has been around? They even found some ancient tables saying (cons nil (cons 'light (cons 'world 'good))).
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2011-10-25 00:34 · Score: 3, Funny

Discover, v., "To visit while white."
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2011-10-25 00:38 · Score: 2, Insightful

Arguably math consists of both invention and discovery:

You invent the axioms; but you then discover the necessary implications of those axioms.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Tsingi · 2011-10-25 00:38 · Score: 3, Funny

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.
Actually it was found in a cave in the Pyranees. LISP originally stood for Lost In Spanish Passageways. It was used by early cave men for catching fish. They drew it on the walls carefully concealing the syntax in pictures of Auroks and it remained totally undeciphered for approximately 200,000 years. John McCarthy wandered into a cave after having eaten some soup made from a prehistoric fungus that grows in the area. He was found days later practising tai chi in a nearby stream and went on to write the first modern day LISP interpreter.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by emilper · 2011-10-25 00:39 · Score: 1

so, philosophy no longer studied for a science diploma ?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 00:52 · Score: 2

Philosophically, you don't "create" or "invent" math you discover it.
That is not universally agreed upon by philosophers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics

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Palm trees and 8
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:58 · Score: 0

LISP was found under a parenthesis left in a storeroom.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by aaaaaaargh! · 2011-10-25 01:00 · Score: 1

I'm a philosopher---by education and in my current job, not self-proclaimed or as a dubious honorary title---and I can hardly imagine anything philosophers could ever universally agree upon.
Perhaps you ought to relax your criterion a bit?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 01:04 · Score: 1

Fair enough, but the post I was replying to seemed to claim as a matter of fact that mathematics is discovered. I was merely pointing out that the debate is still active, and that defending the "McCarthy invented Lisp!" statement needs to be backed up by more than "Philosophers say that math is discovered!"

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Palm trees and 8
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 01:07 · Score: 1

You invent the axioms
Maybe, but I do not think that Euclid sat down and invented his postulates. More likely he sat down and observed various shapes and geometric properties in the world around him, and then formalized what he had observed (or perhaps many people had done so over a period of time, and Euclid wrote down the formal notions that had developed).

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Palm trees and 8
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Arlet · 2011-10-25 01:09 · Score: 1

If people could agree on it, it would be science, not philosophy.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by corbettw · 2011-10-25 01:09 · Score: 1

Take two 256 bit random prime numbers, multiply them, and you have not "created" or "invented" the result but merely discovered it, or rephrased discovered its two factors.
Ah, but if you come up with a novel way to generate those random numbers, along with a novel way to store their representations for future use, then you've invented something and not merely discovered it.

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God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 01:15 · Score: 1

Ah, but if you come up with a novel way to generate those random numbers, along with a novel way to store their representations for future use, then you've invented something and not merely discovered it.
Consider, as a counterexample, the FFT multiplication algorithm. It is based on the observation that integer multiplication involves computing a convolution, and that the pointwise product in the frequency domain is equal to convolution in the "time" domain. The algorithm is only an "invention" if the mathematics the underlie it were "invented," and so this just returns to the question of whether or not mathematics itself is invented or discovered.

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Palm trees and 8
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:17 · Score: 0

I'm a philosopher---by education and in my current job
So you're the one, huh?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by jellomizer · 2011-10-25 01:17 · Score: 1

It was found buried in millions of years of parentheses. and CAR and CDR actually did something useful.

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Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Sique · 2011-10-25 01:19 · Score: 1

You can also invent mathematics.
For instance, to describe how the real numbers are somehow "complete" and contain not only algebraically calculable numbers but also transcendent numbers, there were different ideas floating around, which lead different mathematicians to invent different approaches to describe this "completeness". We have Bolzano's and Weierstrass' approach (bounded sequences and convergent sub-sequences), we have Cauchy-sequences and we have Dedekind cuts. All three were not discovered, but invented to describe real numbers as a super-set of the rational and algebraic numbers. It was later discovered that all three approaches are equivalent, e.g. if you use one approach as axiom, you can fairly easily prove the other two.

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.sig: Sique *sigh*
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by elsurexiste · 2011-10-25 01:21 · Score: 1

Not quite... just looking at wikipedia for interpretations of quantum physics will give you an idea of how much disagreement can be between scientists. Or on how the little world really is: I have an acquaintance whose wet dream is busting string theory, something he says is "delusional". All science because they have scientific knowledge, yet they all disagree :) .

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Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by dorre · 2011-10-25 01:25 · Score: 1

You design notation....
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Arlet · 2011-10-25 01:28 · Score: 1

Note the operative word "could"
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2011-10-25 01:28 · Score: 1

It is true that some areas of mathematics overlap pretty well with observation, and many of those areas had a body of math that(historically speaking) was definitely discovered empirically attached to them long before some more abstract axiomatic system special-cased them. We only have the historical record needed to prove it for some of the; but it seems overwhelmingly likely that people were using math well before they would have recognized the notion of "math", and limited capabilities for processing certain problems involving small integers seem to show up even in babies and other moderately bright animals.

In addition to Euclid, it seems highly likely that applied arithmetic substantially predates number theory, and it is definitely the case that people were putting up with the notion of a "limit" because it made physics work for rather an embarrassingly long time before somebody came up with a definition that didn't contain quite as much handwaving on the question of whether you were dividing by zero...

All of them, though, eventually were subsumed into much more abstract systems that happen to agree pretty well wit reality if you set certain parameters correctly; but encompass broad swaths of material that defies the imaginations of all but a select few, much less explanation by any by the loosest analogies to the material world.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 01:34 · Score: 1

So if I change the lexical analyzer, I invent a new language? I am going to be up to me neck in patents!

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Palm trees and 8
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:38 · Score: 0

All this is my opinion, unrelated to any other person/organization:
Thanks for a much elucidative post. I might reach this conclusion, but since I agree with the parent post, that would cost me some time.
Nonetheless, confronted with a discovered idea, notion or any other entity, people struggle to "find" words to describe them. Ultimately, and that is a matter for people who are more capable in Semiotics than me, the words "found" are merely a form of translation of the real thing (or aspects thereof) -- making the process of inventing a notation an exercise in manipulation (though inventing keywords for key concepts might be considered creative).
Of course, embedded in the notion of translation is the idea that software might be copyrighted but not patented.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:39 · Score: 0

It arguably applies least well in areas like mathematics(grumbling grad students may have certain ideas about the plunder-systems of academia; but they aren't primarily racial...); but it actually works pretty well in geography.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by LWATCDR · 2011-10-25 01:41 · Score: 1

How about author of Lisp? One could even say creator of. Intentor implies that Lisp is an invention which could be protected under patient law while author or creator implies that it could have been protected under copyright law .

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Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:42 · Score: 0

No. There were competing sets of axioms before Euclid. Euclid assembled a particular successful set of axioms.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by boojum.cat · 2011-10-25 01:44 · Score: 1

"Discover" doesn't have to mean "first to discover". If you discover that your wife is having an affair, does that mean that she didn't know about it already?

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Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by zugedneb · 2011-10-25 01:50 · Score: 1

you like it or not, all programming is "interpretation" of abstract algebra and algebrauc structures.
lisp implements a tree of operators, with operand leafs.
thus, lisp is not an invention, it is a choice of tool to use... ...from the pool of algebraic structures.
also, axioms are not invented by genious geniouses, they are formulated after careful observation, or long and hard thinking, or both...
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Jamu · 2011-10-25 01:51 · Score: 1

Surely some parts of mathematics are discovered. I don't think e^i(pi) = -1 was invented for example. Axioms and the proofs might be invented, but the truths of those axioms and theorems are discovered. At least for any reasonable definition of discovery.

--
Who ordered that?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:54 · Score: 0

Let's be honest, he didn't discover shit. He invented Lisp. Period.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:56 · Score: 0

Math is invented as well - it is not discovered. Most math is derived from other math. The rest of it is postulated (invented). Math can't be discovered because it doesn't exist before someone derives it or assumes it.
Mmmm....morning coffee and nitpicking on slashdot. Lord, take me now while I am a happy man.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by drinkypoo · 2011-10-25 01:57 · Score: 1

that's all irrelevant because lisp is a way of representing those numbers, not the numbers themselves, and thus it's an invention.

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by jones_supa · 2011-10-25 02:01 · Score: 1

It's also mildly confusing term how some city "was found" when the land was settled and buildings built.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:10 · Score: 0

> Philosophically, you don't "create" or "invent" math you discover it.
This is far from established.
"God created the integers. All the rest is the work of man ..."
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Sockatume · 2011-10-25 02:18 · Score: 1

While there's an ongoing debate about mathematical constructivism, there is no such ambiguity in language. Languages are constructed. You have a syntax and a grammar, and they are not constrained by pesky axioms or observations.

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No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:19 · Score: 0

I claim this computer language for all Mankind, we came in peace, then conquered it with rifles and cannons when it resisted our efforts to dominate it.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Sockatume · 2011-10-25 02:20 · Score: 1

Programming is not mathematics, though. When the time comes to construct a language, design decisions must be made which are not steered by mathematics.

--
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by dzfoo · 2011-10-25 02:24 · Score: 1

Cities are founded, not found. These are the past tense of two different verbs: to found and to find, respectively.
-dZ.

--
Carol vs. Ghost
...Can you save Christmas?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by ultranova · 2011-10-25 02:27 · Score: 1

Logical concepts exist independent of who wrote a paper about them first.

Would you say that Howard discovered Conan the Barbarian, then? Because the concept of Conan was the result of calculations in his brain; in fact, the concept of Conan is part of the structure of reality in the exact same way that matemathical concepts are. As is this message, for that matter.
So, do fictionary characters exist independent of who wrote a book about them first? And does this mean that writing a death scene should be treated as murder?

--
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by geoffrobinson · 2011-10-25 02:45 · Score: 1

Still going with the math is discovered camp. It's part of nature, in a sense.

--
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by readin · 2011-10-25 02:48 · Score: 1, Troll

Discover, v. "To make known to the both the discovered and those who support the discoverer." Columbus is credited with discovering America not because he was the first person to find America or even the first white person to find America (the Vikings beat him to it), but because he made both the Europeans and the American Indians aware of each others existence - something neither had known before.

But hey, don't let the facts interfere with your racist jokes. Keep making fun of white people.

--
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by networkBoy · 2011-10-25 02:50 · Score: 1

Sadly, with the way our patent system works, likely the answer is yes.

--
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by ClioCJS · 2011-10-25 02:57 · Score: 1

Lisp is not "just math", it is an implementation that must be created. Someone could have easily done the same thing with brackets instead of parenthesis. It wouldn't be the same "discovery", it would be a different invention with different syntax. [oh why oh why did i respond to this?]

--
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:03 · Score: 0

Working in Starbucks is not philosophy. Now go get me my Coffee before I get your manager on here!
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by maxwell+demon · 2011-10-25 03:06 · Score: 1

I'm a philosopher---by education and in my current job, not self-proclaimed or as a dubious honorary title---and I can hardly imagine anything philosophers could ever universally agree upon.
I think all philosophers would universally agree that philosophy is worthwhile. :-)

--
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by stanlyb · 2011-10-25 03:07 · Score: 1

Like, for example, that they could hardly agree upon something?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Eunuchswear · 2011-10-25 03:08 · Score: 1

I can hardly imagine anything philosophers could ever universally agree upon.
Drink? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_WRFJwGsbY
Or football? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79vdlEcWxvM

--
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:10 · Score: 0

No, you don't create or invent math. But you don't create or invent science either, yet you can apply science to create technology. In other words, computer programming is invention through math in the same way that technology is invention through science.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2011-10-25 03:10 · Score: 1

It is my understanding that the rules of racist jokes allow you to make an unlimited number about your own race.

I assure you that I am more than adequately ill-melanized to make all the white-guy jokes I wish.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:10 · Score: 0

Programming is NOT math. Not even close.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by cobrausn · 2011-10-25 03:12 · Score: 2

Yeah, I know. It's difficult enough to get you guys to sit around the dinner table without starving to death or fighting over forks.

--
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by khallow · 2011-10-25 03:15 · Score: 1

Philosophically, you don't "create" or "invent" math you discover it.
And philosophically, you can. Constructivism is the extreme version, but every "discovery" is done so through construction of some sort of "proof" (model or certificate) which demonstrates the discovery in question.

Take two 256 bit random prime numbers, multiply them, and you have not "created" or "invented" the result but merely discovered it, or rephrased discovered its two factors.
And the process of do so is a construction which demonstrates that the product is of those two factors. Math isn't the product of these two primes, but your knowledge of the product of these two primes.

Of course, one can apply that in the same way to anything that is traditionally considered a "discovery". OR conversely, your "discovery" can be applied to anything that is traditionally considered an "invention". A hammer, after all, is a realization of a pattern that happens to be good for hitting things. In the process of inventing the modern hammer, someone had to discover the hammer's shape.

My view then is that one can call all such things either "discoveries" or "inventions/creations/constructions", but there isn't much value in doing so. Hence, I use "discovery" to refer to a pattern or phenomenon that already exists and likely can be used even if one doesn't know it is there. Those tend to be rigid in how we end up describing them. The description of this can be (and invariably is) a construction, but it describes an underlying property or structure which is mostly independent of the description. An "invention" on the other hand is something in which the primary information is in a construction with some degree of flexibility as to how it turns out.

Lisp falls solidly in this second category. There wasn't a Lisp phenomenon which was exposed by a discoverer, but a construction which had to be laboriously put together by an inventor.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by maxwell+demon · 2011-10-25 03:17 · Score: 2

Well, let's look at other fields. For example, I guess everyone would agree that the LCD screen was invented. Now the LCD screen is based on the observation (discovery) that liquid crystals change the polarization of light depending on the electric field, and on the observation (discovery) that certain substances only let pass light of a certain polarization. From those two facts it can be derived that the amount of light which passes through two polarisers with a liquid crystal in between depends in the electric field in that crystal, that is, on the electric voltage between electrodes on both sides. This observation has been combined with the known fact that we see light coming from pixel arrays as images, which also was discovered at some time, to make a pixel array of liquid crystals with polarisers to show an image; the whole function of that pixel array can be derived from the knowledge of the observed facts mentioned above. Therefore, has the LCD screen just been discovered?

--
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:20 · Score: 0

What, you mean founded isn't the past perfect tense of found? Damn.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Tharsman · 2011-10-25 03:24 · Score: 1

He discovered it in a crashed spaceship in new mexico!
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Shotgun · 2011-10-25 03:25 · Score: 2

According to my wife, yes.

--
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by tehcyder · 2011-10-25 03:28 · Score: 1

I thought that the rule with racist jokes is that they're not generally funny.

--
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Broolucks · 2011-10-25 03:38 · Score: 1

We don't know what is "part of nature". Nature might very well be a sort of cellular automaton, in which case the only math that could be described as "real" is the math needed to describe a cellular automaton. Nature might very well be discrete, in which case real numbers have absolutely no basis in reality and are an invention proper. What we observe of reality pushes us to make up systems to describe it as accurately as possible, and in turn these systems are shaped, completed and extrapolated by human thought. Take real numbers, for instance: we intuitively perceive a space continuum where any length can conceivably be cut in half, and such a continuum also happens to be easy to manipulate mathematically, so we made up rational numbers and real numbers. We then showed that both systems are not equivalent, that is, real numbers are a strict superset of rational numbers.
But we don't know if the set of numbers required to accurately describe the universe is equal to either, or a superset of reals, or a subset of rationals, or one of the zillion subsets of reals that could be concisely described, or some completely awkward "thing" that's virtually impossible to formalize. Math covers an extremely wide range of ideas and formalism. Maybe we could frame some of it as "discoveries", but 99% of math is clearly invention and does not correspond to anything real, though it can certainly approximate what we see. The abstract concept of Turing-computability might be a discovery, but I would say real numbers are an invention.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by khallow · 2011-10-25 03:41 · Score: 1

thus, lisp is not an invention, it is a choice of tool to use... ...from the pool of algebraic structures.
Which is what inventions are. The same argument can be made for what are traditionally considered inventions, that is, physical constructions and creations. Their pool of algebraic structures is even smaller since it is limited by physical law.

also, axioms are not invented by genious geniouses, they are formulated after careful observation, or long and hard thinking, or both...
Why do you think careful observation and long and hard thinking are inconsistent with invention? It's worth noting here that first, the choice of axioms is genuinely arbitrary as is its interpretation/relations in terms of other objects. For example, there are the non-Euclidean geometries which are slight modifications of Euclidean geometry but which result in profound differences in the resulting theorems and structures. Then there's equivalent axiom formulations that result in the same system. Euclidean geometry is still Euclidean geometry under an equivalent choice of axioms.

The process of choosing axioms leads to a great deal of invention.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:42 · Score: 0

The general rule about racist jokes is that you are allowed to make an unlimited number about your own race... and white people. Anything else is uncool and evil because white people have spines and can apparently handle it better.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:48 · Score: 0

No, programming is doing math. The program is Math.
Simple like 1+1=2.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Hatta · 2011-10-25 03:49 · Score: 1

Math exists regardless of whether or not it can be used to describe physics.

--
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:52 · Score: 0

Since when?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by jbolden · 2011-10-25 04:07 · Score: 1

This is a constant question. Math invented or discovered? Church calculus I'd say was discovered. How to implement church calculus on a digital computer (?). The specific implementation like cons, car and cdr definitely invented.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by jbolden · 2011-10-25 04:09 · Score: 1

McCarthy did both. No one had actually thought through what a church calculus machine would look like. He discovered many details that pure mathematicians hadn't noticed they hadn't addressed.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 04:10 · Score: 0

Discovered is actually somewhat accurate in this case. The LISP interpreter is basically its own eval statement, which was derived from formal math. It just so happens that you can write programs with it too, although that came later.
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Rhacman · 2011-10-25 04:17 · Score: 2

I'd say that Jerry Seinfeld is generally not funny either but his ability to make a widely successful career out of it leads me to believe this is highly subjective.

--
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Broolucks · 2011-10-25 04:32 · Score: 1

Math exists if it has been invented. In order for math to be "discovered", it would have to "exist" in some other fashion beforehand, and I suppose that the laws of physics could be viewed as being such prior art.
Though, that doesn't really change the thought process of coming up with mathematical tools, so one could say that all math is invented, and that links with the workings of the universe are later discovered.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by jones_supa · 2011-10-25 04:39 · Score: 1

Ah, that's correct. But still.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by osu-neko · 2011-10-25 04:42 · Score: 1

I think all philosophers would universally agree that philosophy is worthwhile. :-)
Ha! There are entire philosophy books, written by philosophers, dedicated to the theory that philosophy is worthless and should be abandoned.

--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Jonner · 2011-10-25 04:53 · Score: 1

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.
No, actually, McCarthy did discover Lisp, at least according to Paul Graham.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by drb226 · 2011-10-25 04:59 · Score: 1

2 unintentional puns that I somehow dug out of this:

Math surrounds us and binds us all together

how's that for an incomprehensible mourning hours post?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 05:23 · Score: 0

Still going with the math is discovered camp. It's part of nature, in a sense.
I think it's entirely fictitious. Numbers don't exist in the universe outside our heads.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Tyler+Durden · 2011-10-25 05:24 · Score: 2

If there is any "discoverer" involved in this, it's Alonzo Church when he invented (or you could argue, found) the Lambda Calculus. That's hardcore math. All of the functional languages, including Lisp, are inventions based upon his work.

--
Happy people make bad consumers.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by heinousjay · 2011-10-25 05:25 · Score: 0

The important thing to remember is that mentioning race does not make one a racist.

--
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 05:37 · Score: 1

Obligatory
Joking aside, the news saddens me. Without him, things would have been a lot different (and, I would suggest, not half so interesting)

--
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by khallow · 2011-10-25 05:53 · Score: 1

A classic being "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" by Al-Ghazali in the 11th century. David Hume also wrote several dismissals of rationalism and empiricism (which were the fad in European philosophy of the time) in the 18th century. The Sophists had a similar dismissal of philosophy in ancient Greece. This is what I came up with, just from my limited knowledge of philosophy. I imagine there are many others where those came from.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by vlm · 2011-10-25 06:09 · Score: 1

Relationship of time to creation / discovery. I can't discover the LCD display because someone else already did. America wasn't created in 1492... there were plenty of non European people who knew about it. Even discovered is a kind of weird phrase since plenty of people knew about it, both here and abroad.
It boils down to a past civilization / alien life form argument. Hard to imagine an even moderately advanced human or alien civilization that doesn't know about DeMorgan's theorem. Clearly only one ancient civilization / alien civilization gets credit for that first creation and its probably not gonna be DeMorgan. This probably applies for all math, or at least all math we've figured out so far...
Then again, our probably unusual abundance of indium which is/was kinda required for LCD panels means we Might literally be the creators of modern LCD panels in this universe. Probably not, but I think it possible.
A sliding scale, with purely theoretical stuff like math and old inventions on the far scale of discovered, and modern and weird ideas possibly being created here by us.
You'd think we've exhausted something simple like the search space of all six-bar mechanical linkages. Then Klann comes up with his walking linkage in just a couple years back in 1994. Or the new Delta linkage robot of the 1980s. Invented? Discovered? Created? Not clear.

--
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by istartedi · 2011-10-25 06:26 · Score: 1

That is not universally agreed upon by philosophers:
Not only is that not agreed on by philosphers, "that" is not agreed on by philosophers.

--
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by epine · 2011-10-25 06:26 · Score: 1

Discover/invent is an old debate fully resolved by tossing back a shooter of Wittgenstein/Austin admixed with Kolmogorov/Chaitin--of equally contentious optimal proportions.
Our patent system allows a person to invent a juicy peach that lands three feet from a swarming anthill if the anthill is preoccupied for a day or two with some fractured apples that landed on the other side, you know, because the ant hill would never get about without the exogenous incentive.
Invention is the ant gnawing through the peach stem six feet above the anthill to cause it to land there before the pterosaur alights on the neighbouring branch.
Applying a function to a function, was that above or beside?
Currying is a funny invention. We all simplify our mental models based on information already in hand. The purpose of granting the data flow of everyday life a formal notation was to facilitate a proof. Godel was the original ant up the tree, on a foot stool erected by Alan Turing. Godel discovered the peach just hanging there, after inventing a clever path to arrive where least suspected.
We navigate cognition through metaphor. It's the great leap of metaphor that constitutes invention.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 06:33 · Score: 0

Math exists regardless of whether or not it can be used to describe physics.
So if math does not exist in our heads, and it's not in the structure and relations of the physical world, where could i possibly exist? Some aspatial, atemporal platonic realm? The mind of God? What does it even mean to say math exists outside of brains and physics?
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Unoriginal_Nickname · 2011-10-25 07:20 · Score: 1

This, exactly.
The classical treatments argue that mathematics is discovered because there is some ephemeral "world" of all possible abstract thoughts, including all possible systems of mathematics for all possible choices of consistent axioms. It's a useful thought experiment, but that's about it. For example, this world would necessarily include all possible novels, because all novels of finite length can be uniquely represented by natural numbers. We can't "discover" a novel, because randomly choosing novels will never yield one that has any meaning. In order to choose a novel that has meaning, we need to invent it first. (If you don't quite understand what I mean, try reading the short story "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.)
Note that the classical interpretation differs from the contemporary interpretation. The modern opinion isn't based on an epistemological argument, it's based on the layperson's misconception of mathematics: that mathematics is some sort of transcendental model of the natural world. You can't blame people for thinking this way, since most people - even at the university level - never encounter mathematics outside of the rote.
The fact is, we choose axioms. We choose them all the time. Sometimes we choose them because they self-evidently reflect reality (e.g. Euclid's axioms) and sometimes we choose them because it is convenient (e.g. completeness, the axiom of choice.) There's nothing stopping you from devising your own totally original system of mathematics, especially now that you no longer have a teacher around to call you stupid for doing so.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Darinbob · 2011-10-25 07:21 · Score: 1

John McCarthy was the first person to turn to a colleague and say "dude, I discovered this really cool language on our computing system, you should check it out!"
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Darinbob · 2011-10-25 07:24 · Score: 1

For example, just last week I discovered a new grocery store that's on my commute. Of course it had been there for some years before I discovered it but that doesn't change the fact that I made a discovery.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 08:31 · Score: 0

In the ideal world of mathematics everything that is logically possible, exists. You only discover.
Think of monkeys creating the works of Shakespeare by hitting typewriter keys at random. Even if it were practically possible to generate large enough random text so that it will contain, with a high probability, all known and future masterpieces of literature, it will take a genius to find an unknown masterpiece there anyway. And he will likely do that by "creating" it again.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 09:42 · Score: 0

No generally the rules of racism just allow you to say whatever you want about the whites. Just don't say nigger.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 11:09 · Score: 0

It's not like the Lisp programming language was just sat out in the wilds of Chile under a rock

It's too bad it wasn't discovered living under a rock in Chile. That's because if I had found it under one rock I would have grabbed a second rock and crushed its little head with it. (Doing everybody a great big favor.)
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by brantondaveperson · 2011-10-25 12:12 · Score: 1

I'm a philosopher---by education and in my current job
That explains your nickname then :)
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Gorobei · 2011-10-25 12:41 · Score: 1

It's deeper than just being a racist joke. It's a reasonable and funny comment on English language and cultural perspective. We write the history books, and that's what Americans get taught in schools.
One man's shipwreck survivor is another man's discoverer.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by lennier · 2011-10-25 12:43 · Score: 1

Math is all around us... in the tree, the rock. Math surrounds us and binds us all together.

There's no mystical universal functional-computation model controlling my destiny!
I don't (eval) it!
That is why (eq you nil).

--
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by atomicxblue · 2011-10-25 12:57 · Score: 1

If it was, I'm sure that Sir David Attenborough would do a documentary on it.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Thing+1 · 2011-10-25 13:46 · Score: 1

(Re: your sig, been waiting a while... :)

[...] Lisp is an invention which could be protected under patient law [...]
You'll be waiting an awfully long time for the protection period to end!

--
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 14:15 · Score: 0

not quite. Columbus discovered America, not Leif Ericson. Vinland didn't stick around or send back enough gold to affect the balance of power in Europe.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by geoffrobinson · 2011-10-25 15:15 · Score: 1

Mind of God

--
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by geoffrobinson · 2011-10-25 15:17 · Score: 1

Then why do numbers in our head work and correspond to reality?

--
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by utahjazz · 2011-10-25 15:18 · Score: 1

Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful arithmetic controlling everything. No math controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by cavebison · 2011-10-25 16:00 · Score: 1

Yes, discoverer. Lisp is programming. And programming is math. Math is all around us... in the tree, the rock.
So it follows then that Jobs "discovered" the iPhone, because the materials it's made up from are all around us, including the software because it's based on math. I guess he wasn't so visionary then.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 20:35 · Score: 0

Fortunately, Lisp isn't a discovery as it was developed from scratch with an application of maths. Your logic would suggest that an engineer could discover a bridge, but not build one.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 03:33 · Score: 1

Funny #1, you used the word "Indian", how white european of you. Funny #2, Vikings are Europeans, and they even had children with the "Indians". I'd think having intercourse and sometimes pregnancy by two groups of people implies mutual awareness, maybe even mutual foreplay and orgasms.
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 04:01 · Score: 1

the invention of the "limit" IS a hand-waving device
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by jahudabudy · 2011-10-26 07:44 · Score: 1

The female orgasm is a myth!

--
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Re:Discoverer or Lisp? by AgedLion · 2011-10-26 21:52 · Score: 1

Your sig is wrong. It should read "grammar errors are inventional."

Discoverer of Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:10 · Score: 0

Where did he discover it? Who actually invented it?

Re:Discoverer of Lisp? by icebraining · 2011-10-25 00:54 · Score: 1

I think the submitter means nobody invented it; that LISP is closer to an universal concept than an invention.
See also http://xkcd.com/224/

--
Dilbert RSS feed

He 'discovered' Lisp? by clickclickdrone · 2011-10-25 00:10 · Score: 1

Waqs it lying somewhere fully formed and he sort of stumbled upon it? Enquiring minds want to know...

--
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil

Re:He 'discovered' Lisp? by kiehlster · 2011-10-25 00:21 · Score: 1

Didn't you know? Lisp came about much the same way the Queen's English came about in Great Britain. Soon after, everyone was mandated to take a course on Lisp, further separating us from those people who argue against it's usefulness in the computing world.
Re:He 'discovered' Lisp? by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 00:57 · Score: 1

Lisp can be viewed as a fancy variant of combinator logic, which is a mathematical model of computation. If you believe that mathematics is discovered, then in some sense Lisp was discovered. This may seem a a bit contrived, since one could argue that a C program is a fancy way of expressing a Turing Machine, although Lisp is a little closer to its theoretical underpinnings than C is.

--
Palm trees and 8
Re:He 'discovered' Lisp? by osu-neko · 2011-10-25 04:44 · Score: 1

Waqs it lying somewhere fully formed and he sort of stumbled upon it? Enquiring minds want to know...
Inherent in the nature of the universe, simply waiting for minds to explore and expound upon it, yes. That is the view of many. Sort of an extreme version of the idea that the Pythagorean Theorem is essentially embedded in nature, and Pythagoras merely discovered it.

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I hear that the greats die in threes by Megaweapon · 2011-10-25 00:11 · Score: 1

So Dennis Ritchie and now John McCarthy....

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Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Nerdfest · 2011-10-25 00:19 · Score: 5, Funny

The universe must be kept in balance. Ritchie and McCarthy were to offset Gaddafi and Jobs.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Megaweapon · 2011-10-25 01:59 · Score: 1

Serious fanboi is serious

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Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:27 · Score: 2, Funny

I AM posting from some shitty descendant of Windows 3.1, you insensitive clod!
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:08 · Score: 1

No, but aphorisms come in pairs:
"Third time is a charm" vs "Bad things come in threes"
"He who hesitates is lost" vs "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread"
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" vs "It takes money to make money"
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever" vs "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may."
"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" vs "Idle hands are the devil's tools"
"Honesty is the best policy" vs "Never give a sucker an even break"
"Two heads are better than one" vs "Too many cooks spoil the broth"
"Don't change horses in midstream" vs "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" ... ...
This is why there is always pithy phrase for every situation.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by catmistake · 2011-10-25 03:12 · Score: 1

LMAO thx for that

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Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:43 · Score: 0

YHBT YHL HAND
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by yincrash · 2011-10-25 03:59 · Score: 1

I think you underestimate the role Ritchie played in the world. Without Jobs, the world would be less shiny, without Ritchie, who the fuck knows what the world would look like because all modern operating systems were built on C.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by jbolden · 2011-10-25 04:18 · Score: 1

Ahhh.... I don't know. Jobs was a great artist and designer. But C and LISP were fundamental to the evolution of computers. Had they not come along computers could have developed in totally different ways. Lets play what if:
For example if C doesn't emerge then Algol style languages don't catch on as much. COBOL and Fortran and better understood and the transition from Network databases never happens. So at a crucial moment in history the spreadsheet doesn't become the dominant data storage paradigm since databases are not young. Because storage is more important than CPU the transition from mini computers and dumb terminals to PCs happens a few years later and the platform is more mature....
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Forbman · 2011-10-25 04:29 · Score: 1

Slight edit: the transition from Network databases (by way of Date & Codd) wouldn't have happened. But SQL's descendents were built on IBM mainframes... not sure they were so dependent on C or LISP at the time...
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Jonner · 2011-10-25 04:55 · Score: 1

So Dennis Ritchie and now John McCarthy....
So, who are you expecting to be the third? I guess Knuth is getting up there in years, but he can't die until he finishes The Art of Computer Programming.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by jbolden · 2011-10-25 04:58 · Score: 1

DB2 has really nice COBOL features, so there is no question that Relational databases would have happened. But they would have been a 2nd tier option like Network databases (now called NoSQL), Associative Databases, Object Databases, Flat ... are today.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Jonner · 2011-10-25 05:00 · Score: 1

Does that mean that Ballmer is next? I shudder to think who'd have to go to offset him.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by catmistake · 2011-10-25 05:11 · Score: 0

Ritchie is a hero, UNIX is my life. It was not my intention to belittle his contributions, which are massively important. But most of the world, those offline, never noticed that he lived. Sometimes we forget that us sophistos are the global minority. Most of the 7 billion alive today will never use or see a computer. Still, Apple, thanks to Jobs, is the most well known, most recognizable brand in the world, even to them. I believe he deserves at least the same respect garnered by Mr. Ritchie and Mr. McCarthy, and now that he cannot defend himself, I will no longer suffer the Apple trolls. Fuck the haters.

--
The Admin and the Engineer
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by jbolden · 2011-10-25 05:15 · Score: 1

Don't forget Ritchie and Thompson worked together. It is not like Unix could have been built on another platform.
So lets play what-if. Unix isn't invented and the PDP doesn't offer Unix as an alternative to VMS.... VMS becomes the high end workstation language, most likely i.e. Digital never loses the top spot to people like Sun. So the Unix server becomes the VMS server, and the mini computer era extends.
Now the question is in that world what does SGI do? I think they put a GUI on a very high end single user version of CPM, sort of like a DOS-32 with GUI. Essentially they invent the the Apple Lisa a year or two earlier. This makes GUIs on home machines (PCs) come sooner but the popularity of business applications a bit later.
I'm not sure what happens from there. Do we converge towards Windows for Workgroups or do we fork off with home machines moving in the direction of Xbox and business machines being even more tied down?
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 08:14 · Score: 0

Hilarious equating Steve Jobs to a ruthless murdering dictator.
You're right, that is quite unfair. Jobs was far worse than Gaddafi.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by boustrophedon · 2011-10-25 13:25 · Score: 1

It's time to reread Statistician's Day by James Blish.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by MadKeithV · 2011-10-25 23:44 · Score: 1

Does that mean that Ballmer is next? I shudder to think who'd have to go to offset him.
This is why there are advanced plans to run Microsoft by Zombie - there are hopes it will prevent major universal imbalance.
Microsoft has been honing this technique for years - the only reason Apple computers can remain so highly-thought-of is because all of the Windows Machines are Spam Zombies.
Re:I hear that the greats die in threes by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 04:12 · Score: 1

Some particle are their own anti-particles (like photons). are there good people who are also their own evil doppelganger, such that when they die the universe stays in balance?

Thanks by V!NCENT · 2011-10-25 00:11 · Score: 5, Informative

(print "World says goodbye")

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Re:Thanks by thomst · 2011-10-25 01:09 · Score: 1

Weep, and you weep alone. Laugh, and the world laughs at you.
FTFY

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Re:Thanks by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 01:09 · Score: 1

I think you meant (format t "~a" "World says goodbye")

/pedantic

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Palm trees and 8
Re:Thanks by V!NCENT · 2011-10-25 01:20 · Score: 1

I think not. First paragraph, third sentence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Wheeler_Wilcox

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Re:Thanks by V!NCENT · 2011-10-25 01:21 · Score: 1

Thanks :)

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Re:Thanks by Fast+Thick+Pants · 2011-10-25 01:54 · Score: 2

Weep, and the world halfheartedly laughs at you. Laugh, and the world doesn't really give a damn. Either way, the world is mainly concerned with extracting your labor and capital.
Re:Thanks by tehcyder · 2011-10-25 03:38 · Score: 1

I think not. First paragraph, third sentence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Wheeler_Wilcox
GP was making a somewhat cynical but rather amusing witticism, playing on the original..

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Re:Thanks by V!NCENT · 2011-10-25 04:11 · Score: 1

I don't think you understand the metaphor.
Nobody is looking to find sadness. If you ask people what they truely want, it's always happiness.
Maybe that's also your problem.

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Re:Thanks by Sebastopol · 2011-10-25 05:19 · Score: 1

bah, another C programmer attempts lisp. bah! /kidding :-)

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Re:Thanks by V!NCENT · 2011-10-25 06:53 · Score: 1

Correct ;D

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Re:Thanks by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 09:07 · Score: 0

He clearly wasted his life. He should have sold fruit-themed PCs etc... full of ideas knicked from other people. His death would have been greeted with wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Re:Thanks by V!NCENT · 2011-10-25 09:09 · Score: 1

+5 Insightful (sarcasm understood)

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Re:Thanks by Riktov · 2011-10-25 14:57 · Score: 1

No need to bother with strings or side effects. This is all you need:
'world-says-goodbye
Re:Thanks by thomst · 2011-10-26 00:26 · Score: 1

I think not. First paragraph, third sentence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Wheeler_Wilcox
Dude. Grow a sense of humor.
Seriously.

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At first I just typed: :( :( :( by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:13 · Score: 5, Funny

.. but then I realized I was missing something.)))

Out of Their Minds by ath0mic · 2011-10-25 00:16 · Score: 2

If you get a chance, I recommend Out of Their Minds http://cs.nyu.edu/shasha/outofmind.html which details some of the amazing feats of McCarthy and some of his contemporaries.

Re:Out of Their Minds by White+Flame · 2011-10-25 00:41 · Score: 2

Some other blog also pointed out that one of the big "modern" features tons of people rely on was invented in 1959: Garbage collection.
Say what you will about Lisp (and I'll say lots of good things about it), but practical GC has tremendous impact. Now, we just have to wait for everything else to catch up to all the other 1960s feature sets (both software & hardware). :-)
Re:Out of Their Minds by tuffy · 2011-10-25 00:55 · Score: 1

Don't forget the even bigger "modern" feature people rely on: if-then-else structures.
Such a trivial thing we all take for granted, but Lisp invented the "if" expression as a more specialized version of "cond". Algol copied it and the rest is history.

--
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Re:Out of Their Minds by TheRaven64 · 2011-10-25 01:51 · Score: 1

To be fair to modern garbage collectors, the algorithm that early Lisp implementations used (Dijkstra) was pretty crappy. Basically, stop the program, walk the entire heap, delete everything else. It introduced long pauses at semi-random intervals and did nothing to avoid memory fragmentation. Generational and incremental collectors made GC generally usable. I think both of these showed up in Lisp before any other language, but neither was present in 1959.

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Re:Out of Their Minds by dzfoo · 2011-10-25 02:50 · Score: 1

What are you talking about? if-then-else is just a symbolic expression of the test-and-branch pattern in Assembly which surely came first.
-dZ.

--
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...Can you save Christmas?
Re:Out of Their Minds by Chris+Mattern · 2011-10-25 03:31 · Score: 1

if-then-else is just a symbolic expression of the test-and-branch pattern in Assembly.
Er, no. Test-and-branch can be used to build if-then-else structures, but anybody who has had to wade through a giant furball of unstructured assembler can tell you, they aren't the same.
Re:Out of Their Minds by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 05:45 · Score: 1

+1 to that.
And it's worth noting that Lisp has GC to enable expressive idioms which are still not available in these so-called "modern" languages (which provide GC mostly to protect the world from lazy programmers)

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Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Re:Out of Their Minds by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 12:46 · Score: 0

Yes, like other venereal diseases, the plague of garbage collection and its unpredictable behavioe continues to frustruate the last three machines that actually use LISP as their primary language. Unfortunately, like the swine flue, the the Lisp worshippers managed to pigfuck and infect the Java community with the *SAME DAMN PROBLEMS*, and it remains a frequent cause of abuse of resources to this day.
Waving a magic wand at your layer of abstraction and saying "and then a miracle occurs" over in someone else's code was core to the Lisp programming approach. There are *reasons* that it's failed in production environments.
Re:Out of Their Minds by Fnordulicious · 2011-10-25 15:13 · Score: 1

Yeah, even the early Lisp Machines had such bad GC that people would instead dump out the contents of memory (save the world) and then reboot. This was a simpler and more efficient stop-and-copy GC technique. I think actually that GC wasn’t implemented for quite a while because there was enough memory and algorithms were carefully hand-tuned to not generate much garbage.
Re:Out of Their Minds by MadKeithV · 2011-10-25 23:47 · Score: 1

What are you talking about? if-then-else is just a symbolic expression of the test-and-branch pattern in Assembly which surely came first.
-dZ.
Well if you want to look at it that way - most computer languages are just symbolic expressions of a Turing machine.

Where did he find it? by PopeRatzo · 2011-10-25 00:18 · Score: 1

Discoverer of Lisp

Who writes these headlines?

"Inventor", please. Not "Discoverer".

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Re:Where did he find it? by Jonner · 2011-10-25 04:57 · Score: 3, Informative

No, actually, McCarthy did discover Lisp, at least according to Paul Graham.

"Discoverer"? by broginator · 2011-10-25 00:19 · Score: 0

Was it just, like, lying on the ground where he could trip on it, or did it fall from a tree and hit him on the head or something?

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god wrote in Lisp code. by Inf0phreak · 2011-10-25 00:23 · Score: 2, Informative

Obligatory xkcd link.

And of course "Eternal Flame".

Yes, the capitalisation of my comment's subject is deliberate.

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________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^

Re:god wrote in Lisp code. by ice3 · 2011-10-25 00:47 · Score: 1

Eternal Flame
Re:god wrote in Lisp code. by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:56 · Score: 0

Here's another web comic tribute:
http://comicjk.com/comic.php/797
Re:god wrote in Lisp code. by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:38 · Score: 0

Way to turn a tribute to a great man into your own political crusade.
Re:god wrote in Lisp code. by ocdscouter · 2011-10-25 04:01 · Score: 2

Obligatory xkcd link.
And of course "Eternal Flame".
Yes, the capitalisation of my comment's subject is deliberate.
Mustn't forget to include the Other Obligatory xkcd link.
Re:god wrote in Lisp code. by rapidreload · 2011-10-25 11:40 · Score: 1

THAT is what the guys at GNU find funny? I guess when you're out to denigrate proprietary software and anyone who uses it, you'll probably end up with so much hate that your scene of humor becomes rather lame.

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(quit) by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:24 · Score: 1

(quit)

Lisp is a fascinating language with honored histor by mapkinase · 2011-10-25 00:26 · Score: 1

Lisp is a fascinating language with honored history in AI, but let me ask you this: is it used now in some important applications? Does modern AI software use Lisp a lot? I am under impression that it is more used in theory than in applications.

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What's going on?! by dzfoo · 2011-10-25 00:28 · Score: 2

Another one gone!

I once created a variant of BASIC to run on the C=64 when I was a kid... OMG! Could I be next??

-dZ.

--
Carol vs. Ghost
...Can you save Christmas?

Re:What's going on?! by dingen · 2011-10-25 01:01 · Score: 1

What is going on is that the time IT has been around is now starting to exceed the average life expectancy minus the age people usually start their careers.

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Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Re:What's going on?! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:08 · Score: 0

I once created a variant of BASIC to run on the C=64 when I was a kid... OMG! Could I be next??
We can only hope.
Re:What's going on?! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:10 · Score: 0

With posts as unfunny as that, we can only answer "hopefully".
Yours, /.
Re:What's going on?! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:28 · Score: 0

Is it wrong to hope for father death to move to the Seattle area?
Re:What's going on?! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:09 · Score: 0

So, are you Simons or Becker?
To add,
I wonder how this passing of a TRUE computer pioneer will go over in the media. I, for one, won't be holding my breath for the Mythbuster's LISP Special.
Fsck Jobs.
Re:What's going on?! by steelfood · 2011-10-25 04:03 · Score: 2

Even if you were the creator of BASIC itself, you're in no danger of an imminent natural death. However, you may still want to go into hiding. I hear there are a lot of angry former BASIC programmers out there.

--
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by CRCulver · 2011-10-25 00:28 · Score: 3, Informative

Lisp is a fascinating language with honored history in AI, but let me ask you this: is it used now in some important applications?

Emacs not important for you? Except for a small C core, everything is written in Lisp.

I think you mean... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:36 · Score: 0

(((John) (McCarthy)), ((Discoverer) (of) (Lisp)), ((Has) (Passed) (Away)))

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by mapkinase · 2011-10-25 00:37 · Score: 1

It is important. I did not know that.

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Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by suso · 2011-10-25 00:38 · Score: 1

Calm down. It took overnight for the news of Ritchie's death to make the front page too. If anything it needs to be verified first. Long time Slashdot readers may remember some of the hoaxes over people's deaths that made it to the front page immediately, but then had to be retracted. Jamie W. Zawinski dying in a motorcycle crash in the late 90s was one of them. If you want immediate unverified news, use social media.

In memoriam by White+Flame · 2011-10-25 00:38 · Score: 1

*closes a Lisp paren (in a real, commercial Lisp application no less) in honor of McCarthy*

Discoverer? by Corson · 2011-10-25 00:43 · Score: 1

"Discoverer of Lisp" -- you mean, Lisp was already invented when he "discovered" it?

Re:Discoverer? by tchuladdiass · 2011-10-25 03:02 · Score: 1

To the extent that Lisp is sort of a mathematical / logical construct, it is often said that it was discovered instead of invented / developed. The same way that Einstein discovered E=mc^2. And in this case, I'm referring to the "inside" of lisp, the core ideas. Not the parentheses that you see -- that is merely and abstraction, just like other math symbols.
To get a somewhat better idea, take a look at some of Paul Graham's essays at paulgraham.com. Specifically, "What makes Lisp different", and "The roots of Lisp".
Re:Discoverer? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:11 · Score: 0

Lisp is a way of expressing a specific set of mathematics, the lambda calculus, for machine calculation. Although there are multiple implementations of the idea: Common Lisp, Scheme, Dylan, etc., McCarthy discovered the idea, i.e. the way of expressing the lambda calculus, for machine calculation.
The inventor of Scheme created a specific method for implementing the idea McCarthy discovered.
Re:Discoverer? by Jonner · 2011-10-25 05:10 · Score: 1

According to Paul Graham, McCarthy discovered underlying principles of computing. If he's right, it would make just as much sense to say that McCarthy invented Lisp as to say that ancient people invented numbers. People gave names and symbols to numbers, but the concept is much more basic than an invention.
Re:Discoverer? by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 05:47 · Score: 1

Lisp is deeply intwined with the fundamental fabric of the multiverse. Always has been, always will be.

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Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.

Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by bmo · 2011-10-25 00:47 · Score: 1

>It took overnight for the news of Ritchie's death to make the front page too.

And that was just as wrong, too.

>Rumors

When TechCrunch posted it 16 hours ago, it's not fucking rumor.

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BMO

Re:At first I just typed: :( :( :( by camperdave · 2011-10-25 00:47 · Score: 1

I was wondering how long it would take to get a closing parenthesis joke. I'm surprised it took this long, and saddened that there was a speech impediment joke before this.

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Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by icebraining · 2011-10-25 00:49 · Score: 4, Informative

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/172798/lisp-in-the-real-world
http://www.franz.com/success/

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Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by CODiNE · 2011-10-25 00:50 · Score: 1

There's game engines written in it. I can't remember right now but there's been a few big ones that used it for their assets and scripts, you could mod them easily.

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That's a sad day... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 00:58 · Score: 0

and slashdot refuses an all closing parenthesis comment: "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
Damn you to Hell, filter!

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by mapkinase · 2011-10-25 01:01 · Score: 1

That's how I think the creator of Lisp could be honored: by posting a list of stuff that matters that runs on Lisp.

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Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by mapkinase · 2011-10-25 01:07 · Score: 1

Thanks, but I would be more impressed by the list of things familiar to everyone, like somebody pointed in the other comment - EMACS.

EMACS and autoCAD. I find it interesting that in the latter, Lisp is offered as language of extension and customization. Is this the common trend of Lisp usage: language of extension and customization?

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Now what do I do? by alispguru · 2011-10-25 01:08 · Score: 1

I've had this picture on my office door for ages.

How can I put a black border around that?

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To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.

Re:Now what do I do? by silverglade00 · 2011-10-25 01:42 · Score: 1

First, put a white border around it. Then put a black border around the white border.
Re:Now what do I do? by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 05:54 · Score: 1

+1 truly awesome.

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Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.

Lisp programmers never die... by Bill_the_Engineer · 2011-10-25 01:10 · Score: 4, Funny

... they just close their last parenthesis.

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Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by robbrit · 2011-10-25 01:11 · Score: 2

It's not just the language that is important, it's the contributions Lisp made to programming language theory: "if", higher order functions, garbage collection to name a few things. See here for a list of things that the language pioneered.

Why so many language creators die? by Arrepiadd · 2011-10-25 01:12 · Score: 1

Soon in Slashdot, and following the previous topic of why so many bee trucks crashing or whatever:
Why so many programming language creators are dying these days?

Re:Why so many language creators die? by betterunixthanunix · 2011-10-25 01:40 · Score: 1

Probably because they were all young and fit when the first programming languages were (invented|discovered|[A-Za-z0-9]+) in the 1950s. That was a long time ago, and people do not live forever. Also, if you are wondering why so many pioneers are dying, it is because the field was new back then; soon programming languages researchers and [A-Za-z0-9]+s will be dying left and right but nobody will care, because the most well-known work happened decades ago.

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Palm trees and 8
Re:Why so many language creators die? by silverglade00 · 2011-10-25 01:43 · Score: 1

Why so many programming language creators are dying these days?
Bee sting allergies?
Re:Why so many language creators die? by dargaud · 2011-10-25 02:04 · Score: 1

There are tens of programming languages in common use, and they were designed in the 50s/60s/70s, so their designers are getting old... 2 in a week is just coincidence, but one a year (Backus, Grace Hopper, etc a couple years back) is no surprise.

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Re:Why so many language creators die? by Jonner · 2011-10-25 05:14 · Score: 1

Soon in Slashdot, and following the previous topic of why so many bee trucks crashing or whatever:
Why so many programming language creators are dying these days?
Maybe people are missing their life-sustaining honey shipments. But seriously, while it is sad that such important people have died I'm not sure two programming language creators constitute "so many."

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by GreatBunzinni · 2011-10-25 01:15 · Score: 1

Lisp is a fascinating language with honored history in AI, but let me ask you this: is it used now in some important applications? Does modern AI software use Lisp a lot? I am under impression that it is more used in theory than in applications.

Autodesk's AutoCAD relies on AutoLisp for a lot of it's features, and also employs it as a scripting language.

As for AutoCAD being considered an "important application", it is the de facto standard for CAD work in engineering, particularly in civil/structural engineering.

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Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by clickclickdrone · 2011-10-25 01:17 · Score: 1

Emacs not important for you? Except for a small C core, everything is written in Lisp

Well, actually EMACS Lisp, which is significantly different to your standard Lisp.

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I never understood Lisp... by halivar · 2011-10-25 01:18 · Score: 1

I mean, shouldn't it be called Lithp?

Re:I never understood Lisp... by BetterThanCaesar · 2011-10-25 02:25 · Score: 1

Discovered by John McCarcy?

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"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Re:I never understood Lisp... by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 05:58 · Score: 1

No.

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Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by A12m0v · 2011-10-25 01:19 · Score: 1

Hence the backronym Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

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Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:21 · Score: 0

Here's one: Abuse - http://lispgames.org/index.php/Abuse. There is also at least one mud codebase that makes use of lisp.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by aaaaaaargh! · 2011-10-25 01:21 · Score: 1

Is this the common trend of Lisp usage: language of extension and customization?

No, Lua, Scheme, and probably also Javascript have become more popular for that purpose over the years. LISP is mostly CommonLisp nowadays. It's very complete, standardized, and some CL implementations like SBCL are very fast, but CL is not very well-suited for extension and customization (at least not for lightweight one). It depends on how you define it, of course; if you include all Scheme dialects and non-standard LISPs out there LISP is definitely alive and used a lot.

The main problem of CommonLisp is the lack of a truly portable, cross-platform, free, and cross-implementation GUI library. There are some libraries and standards out there but most CL implementations don't fully support them, and nothing is worse than half-backed glue code with improper documentation. Moreover, commercial CL implementations are expensive and tend to lock their customers in by introducing small incompatibilities or extensions to standards.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:22 · Score: 2

Emacs not important for you?

Not really. I long ago shunned Emacs' overly complex Ctrl-Meta-dgh-Shift-Y-u-F12 for Vi's much simpler y$12jll:%s/off/on/gkp in order to brew my morning tea, walk my dog, open 38 tabs to my morning news sources, and fetch me my pink bunny slippers.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:23 · Score: 0

Fairly commonly, scheme particularly is widely used as such.

Re:At first I just typed: :( :( :( by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:24 · Score: 0

Well played, fellow AC

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:25 · Score: 0

Lisp is a fascinating language with honored history in AI, but let me ask you this: is it used now in some important applications?

Emacs not important for you? Except for a small C core, everything is written in Lisp.

Emacs, you say? Well, that settles it. Not at all important to a vimmer.

Emacs, really? Someone wrote a flight sim in LISP!?

But seriously, retht in peath, JM. (What? not that kind of lisp?)

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:27 · Score: 0

no, not really.
I have an OS, thanks. Mine even has a decent text editor!

Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by Unknown+Lamer · 2011-10-25 01:33 · Score: 1

Techcruch posted a story based on a single tweet that was linked from Hacker News. It was closer to eight p.m. EDT before there was solid evidence that it was, indeed, quite true. At that point... it seemed more respectful to hold off until the morning rather than posting immediately.

--

HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:34 · Score: 0

These days that sounds good !

(make-lisp-and-die "/tmp/McCarthy.core") by teazen · 2011-10-25 01:34 · Score: 1

and thanks for all the parens..

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by mapkinase · 2011-10-25 01:35 · Score: 1

That is what I meant by honored history. It turns out that's not only AI. "if" - this is truly striking. Do you have any reference about this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_(programming)#If-then.28-else.29 does not provide much insight on the history. Do you mean using "if" as term used for conditional construct? Searching for "if" does not work very well...

--
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:39 · Score: 0

is it used now in some important applications?

We use it a lot in AutoCAD.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by tuffy · 2011-10-25 01:48 · Score: 1

Lisp prehistory details its invention of the logical IF expression which conditionally evaluates one side or another depending on an evaluated result. Fortran featured computed gotos, but they were awkward to use by comparison.

--

Ita erat quando hic adveni.

Goodbye to a Great Man by oakwine · 2011-10-25 01:58 · Score: 2

I am sad to see him go, one more of the old crew departed. Lisp taught me more about programming than any other language. Yes, he discovered it. The Spartans had the Lambda on their shields. They knew about it, they just had no computers! You had to be a bit of a Spartan to keep up with all the close parens. And Scheme, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. A treasure. I hope Lisp lives on at least in academia. The concepts are inspiring even if implementation may be more efficient in an imperative language.

Re:Goodbye to a Great Man by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 06:01 · Score: 1

Lisp taught me more about programming than any other language.
I suspect that's probably true of most of the people who've got past their fear of parentheses, and actually used it.

--
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.

Re:Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 01:58 · Score: 0

Surely you forgot a few parentheses. An odd number of them.

Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by bmo · 2011-10-25 02:00 · Score: 1

And yet it was also confirmed on The Register who confirmed it with Stanford last night before going to press at 23:23 GMT with the story, which would have put it at 7:23 Eastern Time, well before the close of business on the West Coast.

Slashdot editors ignored it. This is especially egregious because they went with the Register story about the Register screwing up its email list and not one of the more worthy headlines on El Reg. Like this one.

And what is this BS about "respect" by not reporting a famous person's death when it's been confirmed? Nobody in the press does that. Absolutely nobody. You're not respecting anyone by holding back on reporting a famous person's death.

The fact is that Slashdot has been relying on this Firehose system over the years which only delays news because stories must be voted up before they appear. It's stupid and a waste of time. Instead of actively looking at submissions, eds are just waiting for stuff to "bubble up" whether or not it's newsworthy. We've seen some real stinkers lately that got voted up and this one languished. Nope, not giving Slashdot a pass on this one.

--
BMO

Yes, yes... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:07 · Score: 0

Alot of computer guys die at the moment, but let's not forget...

Steve did it first!

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:20 · Score: 0

(Rest(In(Peace)))

pWhere have all the good ones gone? by kodiaktau · 2011-10-25 02:21 · Score: 1

Seems like all the language gurus we studied are all passing away. *sigh* pMaybe it is time to drag out an old compiler and run some Lisp in his honor.

Not just Lisp by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:22 · Score: 0

McCarthy also invented time-sharing.

Passed Away by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:24 · Score: 0

Who did he pass? Did anybody see him in the rear view mirror?

Actually, he died.

Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:29 · Score: 0

They should have posted this the day before yesterday.

Hey Slashdot, be proactive for once, dammit!

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by cduffy · 2011-10-25 02:33 · Score: 2

Clojure is a modern LISP -- I have a former employer using it for real-time analytics work (where its transactional memory model made it easy to scale to very, very parallel machines -- the older version of the software written with traditional lock-based concurrency fell down at a fraction of the production load we needed to handle with most CPU cores sitting around waiting for locks.

The biggest thing that interests me, though -- programming in a LISP lends itself to what Rich Hickey calls "hammock-driven development" -- thinking deeply for a long time and then writing very few lines, as opposed to throwing a few Kloc of code at the wall and seeing what sticks. Properly used, modern LISPs are tremendously flexible and tremendously compact -- most of the code I write day-to-day is Python or Ruby, but a LISP's expressiveness is vastly greater than either of these newer languages, and I'm tremendously excited to see folks working on making LISPs practical again.

Ok, that's it by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:38 · Score: 5, Funny

I finally decided to buy an iPad and Steve Jobs dies.
I started a new project using C and Dennis Ritchie kicks the bucket.
Then I started Stanford's AI Course and now John McCarthy is pining for the fjords.

That's it. It's definitive. I'm a God of Death, so I shall use my recently discovered powers for the good of humanity. I'm going out to buy an Oracle DB and learn how to use it. See you on Larry Ellison's funeral next week.

PS: Also, I suspect I'm the God of Rain too, since every time I wash my car it rains the next day.

Re:Ok, that's it by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 08:47 · Score: 0

Do us a favor and learn Java and PASCAL as well. But please stay away from Python. We still need Guido alive and well.
Re:Ok, that's it by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 10:01 · Score: 0

Would you mind visiting Texas? We could *really* use the rain.
Re:Ok, that's it by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 14:21 · Score: 0

I finally decided to buy an iPad and Steve Jobs dies.
I started a new project using C and Dennis Ritchie kicks the bucket.
Then I started Stanford's AI Course and now John McCarthy is pining for the fjords.
That's it. It's definitive. I'm a God of Death, so I shall use my recently discovered powers for the good of humanity. I'm going out to buy an Oracle DB and learn how to use it. See you on Larry Ellison's funeral next week.
PS: Also, I suspect I'm the God of Rain too, since every time I wash my car it rains the next day.
Might I suggest an MSDN subscription?
Re:Ok, that's it by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 16:11 · Score: 0

My god, man, go out and buy a windows PC, before you lose your powers! maybe at a WalMart?
Re:Ok, that's it by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-26 01:02 · Score: 0

If you are so lucky, maybe you should considering subscribing to a Mediaset TV plan (Italian TV owned by Berlusconi)
Re:Ok, that's it by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 02:08 · Score: 1

that's a great gift, please take up java programming, send everyone involved in the creation of java/j2ee to hell. Some of them don't work at Oracle so you need to cast a little bit wider net than just learning their DBMS
Re:Ok, that's it by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-26 05:54 · Score: 0

I would have thought he would put himself inside a persistent CLOS object
using a closure, and thus protect himself from being garbage collected.
Re:Ok, that's it by charlesj68 · 2011-10-26 08:55 · Score: 1

Could I induce you to run for Congress?

Why I prefer Perl to Lisp by TheLink · 2011-10-25 02:40 · Score: 1

Lisp is great for all the code that you have to write.
Perl is great for all the code that you don't have to write.

That's why I prefer Perl to Lisp. For most of the problems I've needed to solve, someone else usually has written most of the required code AND made it freely available for me to reuse[1]. This means there is less code for me to write, document and support. Perl may be ugly and inferior when compared to Lisp, but I only have to write a little of it.

Whereas if I write in Lisp, even though Lisp might theoretically be more powerful and expressive, in practice I would have to write a lot more code than I would have to if I used perl/python or similar.

If you're writing stuff that nobody else has written good tools/libraries for, Lisp might be a better choice.

[1] See CPAN and elsewhere. Examples: Need to talk to Postgresql with an easy interface that prevents SQL injection? Use DBI and DBD::Pg. Need to parse and or create DHCP packets? Use Net::DHCP::Packet.

--

Too many replies beneath your current threshold

Re:Why I prefer Perl to Lisp by jbolden · 2011-10-25 05:06 · Score: 1

I agree with you. The fact that the Common LISP, Common Library was outstanding prevented the emergence of little libraries to fill in gaps and ended up sidetracking LISP. That's why I think Clojure is such a good idea, a LISP with full access to Java libraries and structures. JAVA/JVM is the only thing out there that beats CPAN in terms of library size
Re:Why I prefer Perl to Lisp by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 15:42 · Score: 0

Wow, I didn't know people are still using Perl in 2011. Holy 1997, Batman!
Re:Why I prefer Perl to Lisp by TheLink · 2011-10-25 16:09 · Score: 1

Perl comes preinstalled on OSX, Solaris, AIX, BSD, and > 1000 Linux Distros.

And sure is more powerful than "sh" - and more consistent across platforms than "sh".

One script to rule them all...
--
- Too many replies beneath your current threshold

L.I.S.P. acronym by Fippy+Darkpaw · 2011-10-25 02:44 · Score: 0

Let's Insert Some Parenthesis

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by trb · 2011-10-25 02:47 · Score: 2

Orbitz/ITA

http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory.lhtml

Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by sjames · 2011-10-25 02:49 · Score: 1

It's the JIT compiler again. JIT for what, we don't know.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 02:52 · Score: 0

I've worked on websites that use Lisp. The advantage is that compiled Common Lisp is as fast as C but has real data structures.

very interesting character and great scientist by peter303 · 2011-10-25 02:56 · Score: 1

I crossed paths with him a lot on the Stanford public lecture circuit, both scientific and social lectures. He was very outspoken in his remarks, mainly from a libertarian-conservative POV. He also was very outspoken on usenet sites in his own name when that was an active discussion area.

compuer founders die in threes? by peter303 · 2011-10-25 02:59 · Score: 1

Jobs, Ritchie and McCarthy in just a couple weeks. (two were neighbors)
They say this about celebrities.

plus common-sense & affective computing by peter303 · 2011-10-25 03:02 · Score: 1

John was a proponent from the beginning that a useful A.I. system would need to contain lots of overlooked common sense knowledge and understand human emotions. I dont know if he ever achieved anything practical in this area. But he inspired students to look at this problem.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:03 · Score: 0

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/172798/lisp-in-the-real-world
http://www.franz.com/success/

http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory.lhtml

Airline travel and booking. No that's not important. Owned by Google now, I believe.

don't forget Jef by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:07 · Score: 0

Jef Raskin would have invented something better if it wasn't for Steve Jobs.

Re:At first I just typed: :( :( :( by MadKeithV · 2011-10-25 03:11 · Score: 1

.. but then I realized I was missing something.)))

At least we got Clojure.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:15 · Score: 0

I remember Dave Taylor (former co-programmer of Doom) made a short-lived company that made a pretty awesome PC sidescroller called Abuse. That game was the first time I laid eyes on Lisp code.

I was intimidated by the syntax and all its parentheses back then, because I was a kid and still only knew BASIC and a teeny tiny bit of C.

Now I'm working on a sci-fi themed dungeon crawler in my free time, using Common Lisp as a scripting language.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:17 · Score: 0

Halo 1 for the Xbox runs/ran it's AI in lisp (or lisp like) language.

More than lisp! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:27 · Score: 0

McCarthy created a lot more than lisp - he created the foundation on which the theory of computer science was built.

Lisp herbs & spice? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:32 · Score: 0

Comparing:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/creator-of-lisp-john-mccarthy-dead-at-84/

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders

I smell chicken.......

Still, nobody gets LISP. by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:33 · Score: 1

LISP remains a glimpse of the future of programming, not the past.

"The thing that worries me about this is, is that LISP is now 50 [years old]... and pound-for-pound, it's still truly impressive compared to almost anything most programmers are programming in, because they just don't get it." -Alan Kay

RIP, and thanks for your truly significant contributions to computing.

Re:Still, nobody gets LISP. by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:37 · Score: 0

YouTube can't even make their own links work right. Here is a working link. That or just manually go to 20:55 in the video.
Re:Still, nobody gets LISP. by White+Flame · 2011-10-25 09:22 · Score: 1

Still, nobody gets the proper capitalization of Lisp.
Re:Still, nobody gets LISP. by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 02:13 · Score: 1

oh we get it, but the truth is that anything that LISP can do can be done in many other languages with syntax much easier to comprehend, debug and maintain. Must of the great world-changing softwares were thus not written in LISP. Yes, I'm an old former LISP coder.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Eunuchswear · 2011-10-25 03:38 · Score: 1

Actually it's a bit bigger than 8 megabytes these days:

$ ps -lyp 6038 S UID PID PPID C PRI NI RSS SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD S 1001 6038 1 3 80 0 19432 21965 - ? 00:00:00 emacs23

Of course it's tiny compared to some other things:

$ ps -lyp 2141 S UID PID PPID C PRI NI RSS SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD S 1001 2141 1 5 80 0 155840 119164 - ? 00:19:39 firefox-bin

--
Watch this Heartland Institute video

One of the greats, but not always right by Animats · 2011-10-25 03:53 · Score: 1

I knew him. I went to Stanford in the early 1980s and took his "Epistemological Problems in Artificial intelligence" seminar. He was still determined to make AI based on predicate calculus work.

If only... by englishknnigits · 2011-10-25 03:53 · Score: 1

the language had died instead :(

Math geeks have a problem with that by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 03:55 · Score: 0

It is too much of a blow to the ego to admit that one has spent most of one's education and career studying symbols that we just made up. So instead they insist that the language is somehow woven into the fabric of the universe, and merely being observed, thus promoting themselves to the same level as scientific researchers who gather useful data by observing the real world.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 04:06 · Score: 0

It helped Space Shuttle fly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_Reasoning_System

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 04:22 · Score: 0

I remember Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot and Jack and Dexter

--
spaceman

Basic? Death? Pfff...! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 04:31 · Score: 0

Hey, I re-invented Haskell light, only to discover that full Haskell already exists. But I've seen monads operating on monads, in code using all of GHC's extensions, which was written in 100% point-free style... I don't fear death anymore.

Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by bmo · 2011-10-25 04:46 · Score: 1

Is it JIT even when it's not?

What /do/ you call a JIT compiler that's late?

JIT for sarcasm?

--
BMO

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by jbolden · 2011-10-25 05:21 · Score: 1

I'd argue the main idea of LISP are essentially used in all important applications. It is just too early / fundamental to computer evolution to even think about separately.

All the dynamic languages Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript are unquestionably great grandchildren of LISP and still show lots of the genes. LISP as a language is not doing well, though there finally in Clojure is a modern LISP with professional features. But... the influence is immense.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Jonner · 2011-10-25 05:21 · Score: 1

Although there is a lot of software in use written in Lisp, McCarthy's discovery has influenced programming far beyond that written in Lisp itself. This isn't surprising, since he set out to describe programs mathematically rather than simply create a new programming language. Paul Graham has enumerated the language features that originally made Lisp different. Most of them, including conditionals, recursion, and garbage collection are now commonly used by programmers who know nothing about Lisp itself.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by jbolden · 2011-10-25 05:28 · Score: 1

-- Is this the common trend of Lisp usage: language of extension and customization?

Absolutely. LISP was the language that monocircular evaluation (a crucial step in the evolution of compilers) was invented on. The effect is that most people that ever taken a compiler 101 course have learned to write a compiler in LISP and learned to write LISP compilers in most other languages. And it is far easier to write a LISP than just about any other language.

This is where Greenspun's tenth rule comes from:
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Jonner · 2011-10-25 05:32 · Score: 1

Hence the backronym Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

So, which full-featured editor or IDE uses less than 8MiB today and what programmer uses a machine with less RAM than that? I'd be very impressed if my Emacs (or any powerful editor) used only that much.

Re:Things built in Lisp by stratdesign · 2011-10-25 05:33 · Score: 1

AutoCAD still uses AutoLISP as the main scripting engine, and I believe parts of the core.
Since AutoCAD is used to design ~90% of the buildings of the world (and many of the things within) it could be said that chances are high the house/apartment/mansion you live in, the building you work in, and the ergonomic chair you're sitting on were built with Lisp.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by jbolden · 2011-10-25 05:34 · Score: 1

Sort of. Lets call Lambda calculus / Church calculus LISP's father (possibly grandfather).

The original implementation of if is eval and

TRUE := xy.x
FALSE := xy.y

so if a then b else c
becomes (if-then-else a b c) becomes (a b c)
If a is true the true expression evaluates to (b) if false it becomes (c).

That predates McCarthy. And certainly both Machine, Assembly, ... had if. But... the way we think of if-then-else today came from LISP.

still can't write lisp by kirkb · 2011-10-25 05:43 · Score: 1

I wanted to write a funny "rest in peace" message in LISP, but then I remembered that I never wrapped my head around that stupid language, and only passed my AI course by sharing code with a classmate.

--
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 05:50 · Score: 1

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

8MB is considerably less than may editors which are considerably less powerful.

Effortlessly Making All Coding Simpler.

--
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 05:52 · Score: 1

Abuse. Now that takes me back - awesome game.

--
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by DrVxD · 2011-10-25 05:55 · Score: 1

Yeah; all the EMacs haters are still living in the dim and distant past.

--
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 06:05 · Score: 0

Escape Meta Alt Control Shift

RIP by Krau+Ming · 2011-10-25 06:28 · Score: 1

may he retht in peath.

"Disovered" works... by Fubari · 2011-10-25 06:28 · Score: 1

Math is discovered or invented, depending on who you ask; most agree discovery is part of it, so yeah, "Discoverer of Lisp" works.

The reason "Discoverer of Lisp" works is because Lisp started life as math.
Lisp-The-Language was an accident McCarthy never intended.
How so? McCarthy was refactoring Turing Machine theory.
Then one of McCarthy's student's implemented McCarthy's findings.
This is why it matters (see bolded part).

Catching Up with Math
Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more powerful one than he had intended.
...
So the short explanation of why this 1950s language [Lisp] is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort.

Excerpt from: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
Emphasis added. See the "Catching Up With Math" section.
The link is a pretty cool read, but for the "tl;dr crowd" - don't even bother, just go back to twitter :-)
For the rest of you, it covers some interesting language differences - worth the read if you have even a casual interest in theory.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by biodata · 2011-10-25 06:48 · Score: 1

BioCyc.org hosts genomes and metabolic network models of hundreds of microorganisms. The whole thing is Lisp with a database backend AFAIK.

--
Korma: Good

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 07:24 · Score: 0

Apple's voice recognition software in the new iPhone 4S, Siri, was originally written by SRI, the company Apple purchased. SRI had a history of using lisp...

Third by Dthief · 2011-10-25 07:49 · Score: 1

Finally......after Jobs and Ritchie he's #3.....rule of threes after all

--
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth

Re:Third by RockDoctor · 2011-10-25 22:59 · Score: 1

You've condemned some well-known computing luminary to death in the next 4 or 5 days (depending on your time zone / DST state).
Well done. Law of unintended consequences and all that.
What are the odds ? ... Loosely defining the "Golden Age" of computing as mid-1950s to mid-1970s, and Golden Age contributors having reached 30 in that time (the young have interesting ideas, but it takes time to implement them) ... that would put birth dates in the interval 1925 to 1945, and ages at the moment between 86 and 66.
Yes, they're going to be dropping like flies.
By the way, I believe that the guy has died, not moved to the place where all the pollution goes ("Away" ; been looking for it in the atlas ; haven't found it). We're all adults here ; no need for euphemisms when someone's homeostatic functions stop and gross decay sets in.

--
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"

Re:Things built in Lisp by NetNed · 2011-10-25 08:13 · Score: 1

AUTOLisp (actually now Visual LISP) is just a user customization language to automate some of the commands and the look and feel in AutoCAD and its derivatives. It hasn't been updated in years in favor of using VBA, .NET and ObjectARX, but most that do software support of AutoCAD in businesses still use LISP, at least for simple commands, because most of the same scripts can be used across multiple versions with little to no tweaking.

Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by Unknown+Lamer · 2011-10-25 08:18 · Score: 1

I ignored it (see my user name, I don't have a fancy slashdot badge so I fly under the radar... or remain unknown or something clever) -- The Register claimed to have confirmed it with Stanford... through twitter. I personally prefer having things other than 100 character messages for sources.

Stories posted after around 7 or 8 eastern time tend to not see many comments, and I felt it was a better decision to run it in the morning where everyone would see it at the start of their day instead of hiding out under the overnight stories (and gone from the main page shortly thereafter).

It looks like I maybe should have posted it earlier and not made an obscure Lisp reference (discoverer vs inventor) in the title. Oh well. You can't make everyone happy...

--

HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Unknown+Lamer · 2011-10-25 08:22 · Score: 2

It might seem antiquated and weird to us nowadays, but emacs-lisp is actually fairly typical of the dialects of its day. It's day was just the late-70s/early-80s. Scheme and Common Lisp did a lot to modernize Lisp, and they just happened to be the first popular dialects on commodity machines so it's easy to forget that Lisp predates all computing paradigms and has given them all a shot at one point or another.

--

HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 08:31 · Score: 0

Emacs uses only 8MB of RAM? Heh, that's much less than most GUI text editors!

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 08:54 · Score: 0

Lisp is also used in Maxima, an open-source mathematics program that is similar to Mathematica and Maple.

He(will(be(missed(.)))) by Theory+of+Everything · 2011-10-25 09:13 · Score: 1

That(just(about(sums(it(up(.))))))

Re:Bad Slashdot, bad. by bmo · 2011-10-25 09:33 · Score: 1

Kudos for actually stepping up and replying.

I have to say in reply, however:

"Overnight" doesn't happen on the Internet. Because it's always daytime somewhere, and John McCarthy mattered to more people than just those between the US East and West coasts.

Also, where in the Register article does it say that they confirmed it with Stanford's Twitter? Control-f and "twitter" shows absolutely nothing.

But not even that, since when do we say a source is bad because of the method of communication? Stanford has an official Twitter feed? Who knew? The fact that it's Twitter doesn't make it any less valid.

I didn't know we were a bunch of luddites that shunned "new" technology and communication methods here.

--
BMO

John at Stanford's Computer Center by WeBMartians · 2011-10-25 11:20 · Score: 1

(with his finger up his nose)
"Ya know ... ?
There are sure some weird people around here!"

Ending a bad month by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-25 11:44 · Score: 0

)

No, /. that is my entire comment

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by Riktov · 2011-10-25 15:23 · Score: 1

A lot of the advanced features you see in popular "cool, cutting-edge" languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc. - stuff like closures, functions as first-class objects, lambdas, filter/map/reduce, continuations - were pioneered by Lisp. If you know Lisp, and you look at such languages, it's obvious that the creators also knew Lisp, and when they needed their language to do something that it couldn't otherwise do, they adapted something from Lisp. Interestingly, many such features were not, or could not be, or have been only with great difficulty, adapted to older languages like C/C++.
It's taken fifty years for these modern languages to catch up to Lisp.

The same thing to a lesser degree can be said about Smalltalk. Lisp and Smalltalk's influence is not so much in being used directly to create applications, but in creating other languages.

you sure don't by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 02:15 · Score: 1

The original implementation, LISP 1, had the letters all capitalized. So did many versions to follow.

misconception by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 03:18 · Score: 1

AutoCAD is written in C, AutoDesk provides AutoLisp as one way to access its API, but you can also do so from many, many languages. I was former AutoCAD engineer, CADD/CAE/CAM manager, and AutoLisp coder.

50 years later, FORTRAN more important than LISP by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 03:24 · Score: 1

There are still huge amounts of FORTRAN codes used for the bleeding edge of science and engineering. LISP is used for relatively little. There are even huger applications of COBOL moving money and adjudicating insurance claims. The lesson is that things of beauty to the ivory tower, and real world pragmatism, can be two very different things.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by rubycodez · 2011-10-26 03:25 · Score: 1

While an interesting OS/Program Loader, I'd have to say no, that crappy editor bundled with emacs is of no import to me.

LISP is a beautiful and powerful language by presidenteloco · 2011-10-26 05:20 · Score: 1

Especially its common-lisp descendant with
- full multiple inheritance with decorator semantics if desired
- all-argument-runtime-type multi-method dispatch
- variadic functions with keyword or final-list argument
- multiple-return-argument functions

When it came out, common lisp was lightyears ahead of any other programming languages, and it is still
more simple and elegant and powerful than almost all.

One of its most important features is its lack of giving syntactic precedence to any particular types or operations.
Other programming languages (makers of) seem to believe that computers are mainly about doing arithmetic, so they privilege
the syntax for arithmetic operations (infix, special operator symbols). This sends a message that whatever other
data types and operations you care to define (having only method call syntax to work with) are inherently second-class
and awkward. LISP says all datatypes and all operations on them are equal in the eyes of the language and should be
seen so in the eyes of the programmers. This is a powerful and liberating attitude which aids in the creation of first-class
domain-specific languages (more accurately, function and datatype collections) within LISP.

Another extremely important feature was its concise syntax for switches (cond,and,or expressions) and its convention of
"return a sensible value indicating success, or nil meaning failure or end-of-the-line." This led to very concise intuitive
expression of recursive solutions to problems.

And seriously, if you can't handle parentheses, and learn to use indentation properly and religiously to make the meaning clear,
you really shouldn't be programming at all.

--

Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by badkarmadayaccount · 2011-10-27 20:34 · Score: 1

Well, there are Qt bindings, for starters.

--
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by badkarmadayaccount · 2011-10-27 20:35 · Score: 1

Except Haskell. And OCaml, if you're doing source-to-source.

--
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his by jbolden · 2011-10-28 02:09 · Score: 1

If you think about many of the Haskell libraries they replace the functions of the Common Lisp ones.

Slashdot Mirror

John McCarthy, Discoverer of Lisp, Has Passed Away

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