(exit) John McCarthy

[btiffin]

The lead designer of LISP, John McCarthy passed away on October 23rd.

Lamenting now, but dang...

Ralph Griswold, Dennis Ritchie, Admiral Grace Hopper, John McCarthy, John Backus ... gone. I think programming has officially left the larva stage. Will the metamorphous be buggy or butterfly?

And as a hint to the august members of the compsci community, read up on a still living legend (in my humble opinion), Chuck Moore at http://www.colorforth.com/blog.htm You may get to realize that even the best and brightest deal with life day to day, just like the 99%.

And back to the reason for the post

To comprehend recursion, one must first comprehend recursion.

Thanks for everything John.

[[Gandalf]]

It's crazy when you think about how much they and their inventions have affected the world as it is today. Second line of John McCarthy's Wikipedia page:

Quote:

He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.

That's not even mentioning Ritchie with Unix and C.

[ProgrammingFun]

I heard this...on Engadget...it's sad that 2011 is claiming the lives of so many technological pioneers.

I think that the metamorphosis stage of IT will be a beautiful bug as opposed to a beautiful butterfly.

[mirhagk]

@btiffin, you forgot to link to your first post in your first post.

And I know it's sad to see technological pioneers pass away, but that should just drive us to find those to fill their shoes. To try and be those pioneers, find what the next big thing for computers are?

[btiffin]

@mirhagk; ... "you forgot to link to your first post in your first post."

Good point. http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=29417 goodbye, world - Dennis Ritchie

And "...but that should just drive us to find those to fill their shoes. To try and be those pioneers, find what the next big thing for computers are?"

You know it.

One of the reasons I hang out here is to try and encourage the plethora of demonstrably skilled young up and coming coders that post to these forums to start the Next Big Thing, partly to up my own chances of a great job in the future perhaps.

Old guy ravings...
So I'll re-iterate my own very biased personal opinions on what programming languages developers should be exposed to as 'minimum requirements'.

Assembly, Forth, C, AWK, COBOL, LISP, REBOL, Icon, BASIC, Prolog, APL, Fortran, Smalltalk (missing one or two I'm sure - but the goal is Assembly -> higher-levels, with as many twists on the core point of view of the higher levels and syntax as possible).

Knowing those angles may trigger the eureka of the as yet undiscovered angles to machine problem solving.

Personally, I have a gut feeling that for the betterment of the net of personal computers "it" has something to do with a twist on the mainframe bus applied to a consumer grade model. Big fat buses smushed into Smart cars. A business computer in a personal computer case.

I'd end with cheers, but that's not really the objective of the thread.