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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Lots of Important Computer Science People Dying

John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp, and the term "artificial intelligence," and a person with whom I had an occasional friendly email relationship, has died.

4 comments:

  1. If it isn't too personal, what sort of things did you discuss?

    -walt

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  2. History and politics. John was no fan of Political Correctness, and being at Stanford, there was gobs of it floating around.

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  3. History and politics. John was no fan of Political Correctness, and being at Stanford, there was gobs of it floating around.

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  4. It was bad enough to hear that Dennis Ritchie died. Now, the founder of Lisp! Yikes!

    I've been trying to learn Lisp lately, due to its alleged power. Thus, this really hits home for me.

    It hits home for a second reason: Computer Science is such a young profession, that we almost take it for granted that so many of the pioneers are alive today. It's sad to see them dying, and it's also weird that they are dying at relatively old ages. (As a mathematician, I'm used to "pioneers" being deaf for at least two hundred years--even for relatively "young" fields.)

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