

Ask YC: What should I ask John McCarthy? - mgummelt

I get to meet John McCarthy tomorrow.  What should I ask him?
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cousin_it
Ask him about progress on his language Elephant, where "variables are not
needed because you can refer directly to the past". <http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html>

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kirubakaran
Please convince him to comment in Hacker News.

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signa11
most of the ground breaking inventions / theories are "discovered" rather than
invented. do you feel the same way about lisp ?

another one: lisp and c are both (rightly ?) considered peaks of language
design. they both are predicated on widely different underlying philosophies.
one modeling the abstract nature of computation, and the other modeling the
abstract nature of a machine.

now, given the current state of development, would you consider a middle
ground to be most fertile for the next big language ?

~~~
bridgetroll
What do you mean by "big language?" Importance (a subjective value) or most
widely used (overall or for specific domains) or something else?

Lisp is a functional language, c is an imperative language. Wouldn't a
language "in the middle" risk being a compromise, effectively diminishing or
negating the advantages of each?

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anonym
Lisp is not a functional language except in the trivial sense that it supports
HOFs. Common Lisp is not even functional in the sense of Scheme, where purely-
functional programming is not enforced but seems to be encouraged (disclaimer:
IANAS). Common Lisp is a pragmatic, multiparadigm language in which
functional, imperative and other styles can and should be used as appropriate.
In a very real sense Lisp is that language "in the middle."

~~~
bridgetroll
"LISP has a partially justified reputation of being more based on theory than
most computer languages, presumably stemming from its functional form, its use
of lambda notation and basing the interpreter on a universal function."

\- John McCarthy, LISP - notes on its past and future (Page 1)

Conference on LISP and Functional Programming archive Proceedings of the 1980
ACM conference on LISP and functional programming table of contents Stanford
University, California, United States Pages: .5 - viii Year of Publication:
1980

[http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802782&dl=ACM&...](http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802782&dl=ACM&coll=portal&CFID=66820349&CFTOKEN=28764523)

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jimbokun
Has he seen Arc? If so, does he find anything about it interesting?

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prakash
His thoughts on multicores & parallel programming?

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kirubakaran
May I ask how you got this honor? How does one go about getting a meeting with
John McCarthy, RMS,Stevey and other interesting people?

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mgummelt
Luck, mainly. I'm taking an AI class at Stanford, and it turns out that the
professor knows McCarthy. The class is philosophical, not technical, so I
don't know how all of these technical questions are going to be received, but
I can't not ask them.

~~~
bridgetroll
A philosophical AI class? Please elaborate. I took an AI class for my CS
degree and it was technical.

~~~
mgummelt
There are technical AI classes here that are required for a CS major. This one
is an elective called "Can Machines Think? Can Machines Feel?". We read famous
AI papers (including McCarthy's "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines") and
talk about what's possible and what's not.

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jimbokun
I recently read quotes from Dr. McCarthy that are quite critical of
"liberals".

(some examples here:
[http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/john_mccarthy.ht...](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/john_mccarthy.html))

Does Dr. McCarthy consider himself politically conservative, libertarian, or
something else? Do any current presidential candidates or other politicians
come close to reflecting his views?

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watmough
What does he consider a reasonable 'largest size' for a computer software
system, and is there any limit on this?

Should one person be able to hold the overall design in their head?

Examples: Operating systems, office software, languages.

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mojuba
Lisp was meant to be a language for AI research originally, but as we all
know, no progress has been made in this field since Lisp came out. I'm curious
what JMC thinks about this. Doesn't he think, for example, that there is no
connection between Lisp and intelligence? Or maybe it's too early to talk
about this?

~~~
davidw
> no progress has been made in this field since Lisp came out.

Lisp came out in 1958, according to the wikipedia page:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29>

Saying that nothing has happened in AI since seems a bit...exaggerated. But I
don't know much of anything about the field - anyone else care to comment?

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mojuba
My view may sound rather radical, but I think not everything that's called
"A.I." has to do with intelligence. In other words, if a progress is reported
by an AI researcher, it doesn't mean anything.

There are many forms of intelligence and for example Turing machines are just
one, probably. If we are talking, however, about intelligent survival machines
like ourselves, then we are not even close to understanding how it works.

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neilc

      as we all know, no progress has been made in [AI research] since Lisp came out
    

You may have some unorthodox views on what "AI research" constitutes or how
much progress had been made, but prefixing your comment with "as we all
know..." is obnoxious. The consensus view is certainly _not_ that no progress
at all in AI has been made since 1958.

~~~
mojuba
Care to show anything that we use in everyday life and that evolved from the
AI science as a result of its 50-year existence? Ok, except CAPTCHA maybe
(just kidding).

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globalrev
did u understand lambda-calclus or your whole awesome languagecreation called
LISP was just a fluke?

in terms of AI, what will be next big steps, what kind of models will we go
towards?

what do you think the future programming languages will look? lets say in 20
years and then in 50years? will there be more singleparadigm-oriented
languages or most languages will be multipardigm?

~~~
davidw
(Not to be pedantic, but could you make an effort to write correctly?)

Edit: looking up people's history and randomly voting down what you can is
pretty lame.

