John McCarthy, Discoverer of Lisp, Has Passed Away

The first of a few submitters, szo sent in an early report that John McCarthy passed early yesterday. Paul Graham (among others) confirmed: the news was true. And so, shortly after a fellow founder of countless language descendants, goes the founder of the Lisp tree at the age of 84.

Comments

Re:Discoverer or Lisp?

[vlm]

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.