One of the greats of computer science, John McCarthy, died on Monday at the age of 84. I had the privilege of seeing a presentation of his at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton while I was a PhD student at Wharton. I think it was in 1990. My primary memory of this presentation is that he was quite the character. He had boundless optimism and attitude.
Wouldn’t you if you saw in your rear view mirror what he saw?
Let's see...
- Invented LISP. Only the coolest programming language ever. Especially if you learn it from this book! Anything fun that you can do with a programming language can be done better and more elegantly with LISP: functional programming, lambda functions, language processing, knowledge management...whatever.
- Invented garbage collection. This is one of the techniques that frees programmers from having to manage memory explicitly --- the dreaded malloc from C programming and all those related terrors. It is used in many, if not all, scripting languages (like perl and python) and in Java as well.
- Invented time-shared computing. This is the technique whereby very expensive computing resources could be shared by needy users far and wide. Before PCs were invented, if you got to use a computer, it was likely that you were sitting in front of a terminal connected to a time-shared computer.
- And, really, as if that weren’t enough, he also gave impetus to the inventors of public key cryptography. So any time you, or anyone else, bought anything on the Internet, you should have thanked Dr. McCarthy.
In any case, we are all a little poorer today, but we are enriched for having him around.
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