('born '1927)
('championed 'ai)
('created 'lisp)
('thought-up 'space-elevator)
('won 'turing-award)
('died 'oct-23-2011)
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Computer Science has had a hard few days:
First Steve Jobs of Apple died
then Dennis Ritchie co-developer of Unix and C dies
and now John McCarthy has died
John was the author of LISP and is credited with coining the concept of Artifiicial Intelligence.
He also turned his attention to a number of…
I just heard that John Backus died last saturday.
John Backus was one of the most influential people in the development of what we now know as software engineering. In the early days of his career, there was no such thing as a programming language: there was just the raw machine language of the…
If we're going to make it in this future of ours, we've got to stop thinking that our planet hangs in some kind of splendid isolation in the dead vapor of empty space. We're part and parcel of a dynamic system, a vast cosmos of activity and, probably, intelligence; though our home planet's life…
Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time! is a book about lisp programming. If you are into programming for fun, artificial intelligence, role playing games, or an emacs user, you should take a look at this book. I've got some info on this book as well as a few others for the…
I'd like to add another important prediction by JMC, found in Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", section 12.2 (p. 350f in my paperback): He noted that only few poets can make a living selling poetry books. As a solution he recommended to put the texts onto an "international network" (yet to be invented back then) where people can read them for a penny to be transferred to the poet's account (using a method to be invented as well).
I must be getting old, virtually all the people I admire are either dead or dying.