That read a lot like the recent Bill Watterson interview.<p>Fans: Blah blah blah invention of lisp 50 years ago?<p>McCarthy: I don't know, I can't remember that far back in that much detail and it doesn't matter now anyway; can't you move on and ask me something about my recent work and stop objectifying me as some kind of ancient artifact?<p>Fans: Thanks for the interview, we all appreciate you inventing Lisp!<p>McCarthy: {smiles through tensed jaw muscles and compressed lips}<p>* Implied content, they didn't actually say these things.
I thought this was great. Newell & Simon are sort of heroes of mine, and I enjoyed hearing McCarthy's view of the relation of Lisp to IPL & Fortran (from Backus). Are there any good biographies of these people? (I know that Simon wrote an autobiography, but I haven't read it.)<p>The summary of the big ideas/innovations from Lisp was pretty awesome -- programs as data, first-class functions, an expression-oriented language, eval as a Turing-complete function, garbage collection, linked lists, etc.<p>Guy Steele mentions he is standing in for Alan Kay. I wish whoever arranged that would put together a panel discussion with Alan Kay and Guy Steele talking about programming languages... or pretty much anything...