He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense

...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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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.

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.

By Birger Johansson (not verified) on 25 Oct 2011 #permalink

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.

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

By David B. Benson (not verified) on 25 Oct 2011 #permalink

(rest '(in peace))

By Lars Karlsson (not verified) on 26 Oct 2011 #permalink