(announce-state! `john-mccarthy `passed-away)
John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp and a major pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, passed away sometime last night. He was 84 years old.
It seems that October of 2011 is an unhappy month in the computing world.
How does John McCarthy's work affect you? Well, Lisp was the first practical application of Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus and Haskell Curry's combinatorial logic in computing. If you've ever done functional programming, or even used an anonymous function or a callback in JavaScript, you are standing on the shoulders of this giant.
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” --Donald Knuth
"It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, 'neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.'" -- Alex Papadimoulis (on TheDailyWTF.com)
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