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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.
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.
