John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp and father of modern artificial intelligence, dead at 84

[ultrafilter]

It’s been a bad month for the second wave of computer pioneers:

The creator of Lisp and arguably the father of modern artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, died last night. He studied mathematics with the famous John Nash at Princeton and, notably, held the first “computer-chess” match between scientists in the US and the USSR. He transmitted the moves by telegraph.

McCarthy believed AI should be interactive, allowing for a give and take similar to AI simulators like Eliza and, more recently, Siri. His own labs were run in an open, free-wheeling fashion, encouraging exploration and argument. He won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991.

For those of you who don’t know, the Turing award is the closest thing that computer science has to a Nobel prize. While McCarthy wasn’t quite as influential as Jobs or Ritchie on the average programmer’s work, there’s no doubt whatsoever that his work had a huge impact on the modern world.

[njtt]

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[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

Original Tweet here.

It’s pretty remarkable what an influence he had on computer science. The first paper on garbage collection, the Lisp programming language, pioneered the science of knowledge representation, etc.

[njtt]

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[cochrane]

Already posted just down the page.

John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp and father of modern artificial intelligence,...

[twickster]

Merged duplicate threads.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

@ultrafilter

While McCarthy wasn’t quite as influential as Jobs or Ritchie on the average programmer’s work, there’s no doubt whatsoever that his work had a huge impact on the modern world.

I don’t know about that. Lisp was the first garbage collected language, the first language with an if-then-else construct, the first language that allowed re-entrant functions (in early version of Cobol and Fortran functions could not be recursive), the first dynamically typed language, and so on.