He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense

Posted by William M. Connolley on October 25, 2011
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…as JMC said. Another one bites the dust. Not that I ever got on terribly well with LISP (I know, I know, don’t tell me).

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Comments

  1. #1 andrewt
    2011/10/25

    Never met jmc but I was sad to hear about his passing. I didn’t agree with much he wrote in sci.env (apart from no arithmetic-> nonsense) but he was always crystal-clear, conscise & interesting. I haven’t used Lisp for 30 years but it changed my view of programming languages.

  2. #2 Birger Johansson
    2011/10/25

    Have you noticed that he was born 2-3 weeks before the conference in Switzerland where Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg et al hammered out the version of quantum physics that has been mostly unchallenged until now? Of course, this is merely symbolically interestling, like the birthday shared by Lincoln and Darwin.

  3. #3 Nick Barnes
    2011/10/25

    Whatever one thinks of Lisp (and personally it pays my rent), remember that it gave us not only garbage collection but also the execution stack.

  4. #4 David B. Benson
    2011/10/25

    And LISP also eventually provided upward fun args and so became what John had always wanted, a computer implementation of the (untyped) lambda calculus.

  5. #5 Lars Karlsson
    2011/10/26

    (rest ‘(in peace))

  6. #6 CatherineDaniels21
    2011/10/28

    If you want to buy a car, you will have to get the credit loans. Moreover, my mother all the time takes a bank loan, which supposes to be really rapid.