What is going on here? Titans of the computer industry are falling like flies! RIP McCarthy - LISP will always be the best language that I never get to use.
Father of Lisp and AI John McCarthy has died
Stanford University has confirmed that John McCarthy, the inventor of the LISP programming language and one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI), has died at the age of 84. Among developers, McCarthy may be best known as the inventor of Lisp, which he devised in 1958 while at MIT and published in the seminal work " …
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 08:15 GMT Yag
Humans are not immortal...
Computer science is now 50 years old, no wonder the early pioneers are dying from old age.
At least, 84 is quite honorable... Poor Turing didn't even made it to half of this.
All in all, it's always sad when one of our bearded forefather close his final bracket (or parenthesis in this case).
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 00:45 GMT Sam Johnston
Father of cloud computing dies
"If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry."
— John McCarthy (speaking at the MIT Centennial in 1961)
It's been pointed out that McCarthy used the term "utility" rather than "cloud", but many of us would argue they are one and the same. Indeed Wikipedia defines it as:
"Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet)."
In any case, can anyone think of anyone more deserving of the honour of the title "father of cloud computing" than McCarthy? I certainly can't.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 01:09 GMT Destroy All Monsters
λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x))
Woah "rule of three" etc...
Steve, Dennis, John.
No hold on. Steve doesn't really fit. No rule of three then.
Ah the times when I exchanged my summer holiday for the joy of writing a Scheme interpreter in the first version of Turbo C++. I had to use overlays, too.
BEER NOW.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 01:09 GMT Louis Savain
Sad But...
Yes, John was a thinking man, a giant in his day. I don't like lisp (or any functional language) but it could just be me. Others swear by it. Still, McCarthy did as much as anybody (certainly as much as Minsky) to get AI research stuck in the hopeless rut of symbol manipulation for half a century. What a waste of time and brains! It is only recently that new thinkers in the field have begun to realize that intelligence is at its core a tenmporal phenomenon.
That being said, "artificial intelligence" has a nice ring to it. I thank McCarthy for that because the phrase has caused more people to become interested in the field than anything else.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 09:18 GMT John Smith 19
@Louis Savain
"Still, McCarthy did as much as anybody (certainly as much as Minsky) to get AI research stuck in the hopeless rut of symbol manipulation for half a century"
I'd suggest you' restrain your annoyance for Marvin Minsky & Seymour Papert (who invented LOGO). Their book "Perceptrons" is credited with killing funding on neural networks in the US for decades.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/285702
For a description of the human behavior behind the AI.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 12:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Louse Savain is a full time troll
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Louis+Savain
Wasted more time than you can possibly image. Do not feed or it comes back.
Their perceptron work was just to point out that these devices had limits, that's all. (and only in those with few hidden layers IIRC). They never intended to knacker the whole field, just inject a little reality.
Happened to be doing emacs lisp right now, how's that for a tribute to longevity.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 10:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
You're *the* Louis Savain, aren't you? And the "new thinkers in the field"? That'd be you, would it? With your description of intelligence derived from biblical sources? http://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/Louis-Savain/2004/7/Artificial-Intelligence-and-Bible - sadly your groundbreaking work in this area seems to no longer be available. Yet here you are having a bash at McCarthy, who actually, you know, DID USEFUL STUFF.
As for intelligence being a tenmporal phenomenon, can you name a phenomenon that isn't tenmporal? You may as well say it's a spatio-tenmporal phenomenon, that'll get the buzzwords in without making the assertion any more meaningful, or any more correctly spelled.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 04:37 GMT sisk
RIP McCarthy. We built a chunk of an industry on your back, so I'd say you earned the rest.
They say things happen in threes. If you count Jobs (I wouldn't, but the case could be made) that makes three men who helped build the pillars of the modern IT world to leave us in the last month. Can we stop now? My toasts are going to start getting repetitious if too many more of these oldschool geniuses die.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 10:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
@sisk
I quite agree with you that Jobs was a different kind of giant. Unlike Ritchie and McCarthy, who were uebertechies with superb vision of what their inventions might be used for, Jobs was essentially a magnificent marketing man. (I use "marketing" in its widest and best sense, to mean finding out what people want - even if they don't realise it - and giving it to them in a form that delights them). Jobs didn't invent new technology: instead, he used other people's inventions to the best advantage, often in ways even they never dreamed of.
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Wednesday 2nd November 2011 13:49 GMT Astarte
Dijkstra - Yea
I love my satnav - Thank you Edsger and McArthy.
I once programmed in Lisp and enjoyed it very much even if it did affect my speech for a while. I was also using FORTH at he same time but that's another story.
McArthy was a proper expert in his field and will be sadly missed, like many other unsung heroes.
RIP John McArthy (Black Border)
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 11:16 GMT JeffyPooh
Thank you Mr. McCarthy
I was introduced to Lisp at university, but I never used it in anger (except on some assignments). Just knowing it existed has had a very subtle impact on my thinking. If Lisp exists, then what else is possible?
For those that also dabble in hardware, the list of recently-fallen tech heroes includes Jim Williams and Robert A. Pease.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 13:13 GMT Robert Hill
He IS the third...
Sorry, you have to include Jobs. Jobs has always LOVED hardware, much more than software, and even though his best role is as salesman and visionary, he certainly pushed the development of hardware at Apple to new, industry-influencing levels. He DID shift paradigms, even if he didn't invent them himself.
McCarthy...what a loss. I've done a little work with LISP (Literally Infinite Sets of Parenthesis!), but the language itself wasn't what was important. It was his vision of intelligent machines, and his acknowledgement of both their practicality, and certain limitations, that made McCarthy such a seminal figure. Back in those days, it took a great stretch of the imagination to think about a machine that COULD think.
RIP...
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 13:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
(pithy lisp thingy here)
For the longest time I'd seen AI as, well, sort-of the sociology of computer science. Grandiose claims, no rigour, little result. They admit that, too: Took them a couple decades to figure out that scientific method isn't merely a neat idea. Even so, there's been some good stuff, most of it rather hidden and non-obvious to the casual user. Now that I'm actually looking into it (stanford's webalized introductory courses), I can see where the use lies. Even though it's been slow going, perhaps unnecessarily so (who's to say? or maybe, when might we be able to say? it'll be a while.) it has done its bit to advance the state of the art. To the point that the US military did, in the end, get their killer app that was, in their words, worth the 30 years worth of investments.
So a salute to the lisp guy. And thanks for all the lithpth.
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 13:17 GMT Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
LISP
I wish I could say I had fond memories of LISP
LISP = Lots of Irritating Spurious Parentheses :-))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Doesn’t EMACS use LISP as its extension language, presumably that why EMACS Eventually malloc()'s All Computer Storage, it to store all those parentheses.
I wonder will Bono (hack, spit) go to John McCarthy;s funeral
(CONS ('John McCarthy' 'Denis Ritchie’) (Departed_Giants_of_computing)))
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Tuesday 25th October 2011 23:32 GMT Mike VandeVelde
AI
We're no closer to AI than when he first invented the term, only able to make that much more detailed simulations thanks to moore's law marching on. Could have made a computer to win every possible chess match in the 70s if there were terabytes of memory and petabytes of storage and gigahertz of processing power available. Could make an expert system truly expert if you jam in enough rules and have enough processing power to trawl through them all. But that's not how intelligence works. Or maybe it is, who can say, we still have barely the faintest clue.
When the internet gains (gained?) consciousness, the trick will be (is?) to even recognize it as such. If it influences the world, say by creating online personalities, or altering communications between actual personalities online, who could guess what the goal might be? How long do you suppose it could (will?) go on without breaking through the surface of human awareness? When Gaia reaches this level in planetary evolution, who or what out there might take notice? At some point maybe the need for us fungal microbes that made it all possible might fade away, maybe there will be some kind of a molting?
I took the artificial intelligence option at school because it sounded interesting, and it was, but fat lot of good it did me :( Lisp and Prolog, like LSD and DMT, give your brain a good stretching, that can be healthy in some way I suppose, but not much more point to it than that.
Cheers to the man for doing his bit to keep novelty progressing.
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Wednesday 26th October 2011 11:02 GMT Bradley Hardleigh-Hadderchance
T
I like this quote from the jargon file:
===========================
In LISP, the constant T means `true', among other things. Some Lisp hackers use `T' and `NIL' instead of `Yes' and `No' almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. When a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he may absently respond `T', meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be brought a cup of tea instead.
==============================
Gave me a chuckle.
What a great achievement to have made in your life. Not just a great personal achievement, but an accomplishment that has contributed so much to so many. A truly great man.
Very few in my opinion hold this great mantle. Dennis Ritchie was one of the chosen. One of the few to be sure. (c) Andrew Eldritch. When I was homeless and had to gather my things in a bag, I made sure I had K&R in there. I still couldn't understand a bloody word of it, but it was smaller than Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. J/K. Except about the K&R.
When I die, I doubt I will get a head stone. Though if I did, I know it will not say: Here lies a great man. I am okay with that. It also will not say: Here lies a bad man. And I am even better with that one. It just heartens me to know, that I lived for a time on planet Earth amongst the scum-suckers and don't-know-any-betters, and that people like this existed - a beacon to humanity, something to strive for.
And it might be wrong of me and a great failing, but I would be disappointed if he was not a good person as well. I have high standards for my heroes.
Now, T anyone?
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Wednesday 2nd November 2011 13:50 GMT JassMan
At the risk of inviting loads of flak, can I just say say that of all the great things John should be remembered for, LISP is not one of them. It must be the most difficult language of all to debug. Or even read if someone else has different ideas about how to group brackets in a vain attempt to make it logical. Or, god forbid they have passed the source through a white space compacter.
Unmatched "(": is not the world's most helpful error message in a language which consists of almost nothing but (((((((((((((...