R.I.P. John McCarthy

[Howard Owen]

Another seminal figure in the computer revolution has died.

http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/john-mccarthy-dies/

[MK-52]

(format t "I'm sorry to hear that...")

Edited: 25 Oct 2011, 11:44 a.m.

[Norman Dziedzic]

Strangely for a mechanical engineer, I have had exposure to LISP. We used to call it, "Lots of Irritating Silly Parenthesis".

It was used as the scripting language for AutoCAD software.

RIP John McCarthy

[Nick_S]

That is shame. His LISP language seems to have been an important influence on HP's RPL, where HP removed the need for parentheses by making theirs a post-fix functional language drawing on their own RPN and Forth. I still get a buzz out of passing named and anonymous functions around as parameters, e.g, when using the R language or one of my HP calculators, rather than just manipulating data.

Nick

Edited: 28 Oct 2011, 5:39 a.m.