John McCarthy Dies, Age 84
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 25th Oct 2011 12:50 UTC, submitted by JAlexoid
General Development The news already hit HackerNews late last night, but at that time there was no confirmation so I decided to wait until we knew for sure. Well, after Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs, the technology world lost another great mind yesterday. Stanford has confirmed that John McCarthy, the creator of LISP and the father of artificial intelligence, has passed away, age 84.
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RE[2]: Oddly enough
by BeamishBoy on Tue 25th Oct 2011 19:47 UTC in reply to "RE: Oddly enough"
BeamishBoy
Member since:
2010-10-27

LISP is still my favourite. The cleanest programming language and still the most powerful.


Well, I'm really having a blast learning it but I'd disagree (albeit slightly) on both points.

I find it clean in the sense that the logic behind Lisp code is very intuitive but the forest of parens makes it a bit difficult to read at times.

And, although this is ludicrously suggestive, I'm not sure its as powerful a language as more modern functional languages either. I find Haskell, Erlang, and Scala in particular to be more expressive (and hence more powerful in my opinion) than Lisp.

Then again, I still know nowhere near as much about Lisp as I'd like to so I fully expect my opinions to change entirely in about a month. ;-)

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[3]: Oddly enough
by jhuni on Thu 27th Oct 2011 03:38 in reply to "RE[2]: Oddly enough"
jhuni Member since:
2011-10-27

None of those non-AI languages are as powerful as Lisp, actually Haskell is a purely functional language that is primarily focused towards improving applied type theory and automated theorem proving, Erlang is primarily focused on fault-tolerance, and Scala is many focused on JVM scripting.

None of these systems are as powerful as Lisp because Lisp is focused on creating AI, rather then solving specific programming problems. I do not mean to imply that Lisp is better then any of these languages, those languages are fantastic in their own domains, however, they do not have the power of adapting to any domain of your choosing, which is present in Lisp. See Of Lisp Macros and Washing Machines for more.

Edited 2011-10-27 03:42 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 0

RE[5]: They have plenty of reasons...
by zima on Tue 1st Nov 2011 23:42 in reply to "RE[3]: Oddly enough"
zima Member since:
2005-07-06

those non-AI languages ... Lisp is focused on creating AI

So how's that AI creation going along? ;)

As a matter of fact, most of ~AI systems in practical (or Watson-like) use seems to be written in non-Lisp (the years of Lisp domination in this field possibly even being a time of very inaccurate perceptions in the style of "real AI, any year now")

Reply Parent Score: 2