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

Discoverer or Lisp?

[agentgonzo]

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?

[erroneus]

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?

[sapphire wyvern]

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?

[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.

Re:Discoverer or Lisp?

[theVarangian]

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?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Discover, v., "To visit while white."

Re:Discoverer or Lisp?

[Tsingi]

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.

Thanks

[V!NCENT]

(print "World says goodbye")

At first I just typed: :( :( :(

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I hear that the greats die in threes

[Nerdfest]

The universe must be kept in balance. Ritchie and McCarthy were to offset Gaddafi and Jobs.

Re:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:let this be a lesson to you

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Lisp is a fascinating language with honored his

[icebraining]

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

Re:RIP and thank you for AI

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Lisp programmers never die...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

... they just close their last parenthesis.

Re:RIP and thank you for AI

[tibit]

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.

Ok, that's it

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Where did he find it?

[Jonner]

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