
An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions (1958) [pdf] - kbp
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/AIM-001.pdf
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fernly
Reading this my eye was caught by the name Gelernter. Wait, wasn't that the
guy who... no, it was his father, Herbert[1], who

> implemented, with Nathaniel Rochester, a computer language for list
> processing within FORTRAN ... the Fortran list processing language (FLPL)

His son David, who would have been 3yo at the time McCarthy wrote this paper,
has had his own effect on computer science[2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Gelernter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Gelernter)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter)

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shakna
Page 10. A description of a linked list, and the memory structures required to
intermingle them.

Incredibly simple, powerful, and to my eyes, beautiful.

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newman8r
They've got some interesting content
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/)

A lot of ideas about what was only theoretically possible at the time - good
time to revisit.

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cjauvin
_It [the language] is not so convenient for representing lists of fixed length
where one frequently wants the nth element where n is computed rather than
obtained by adding 1 to n-1._

I find this is an interesting way of saying it, it made me think for a
moment..

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JBiserkov
Reading this I get an urge to reach back in time and tell the author about all
the amazing programs and languages this work will lead to, about Emacs,
Scheme, Clojure, ...

~~~
sitkack
He found out. Not sure he used any Clojure.

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tpetricek
For anyone interested in additional context, the paper "AI and the Origins of
the Functional Programming Language Style " by Mark Priestley is a great
introduction:
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-017-9432-7](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-017-9432-7)
(sorry, I don't have a non-paywalled link, but SciHub does the trick).

~~~
shanusmagnus
Here's a PDF from the author's site:

[http://www.markpriestley.net/pdfs/AIandFunctionalStyle.pdf](http://www.markpriestley.net/pdfs/AIandFunctionalStyle.pdf)

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seesomesense
Another classic paper by John McCarthy, the father of Lisp and much of early
AI.

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johnhenry
For anyone wondering about the source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scient...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_\(computer_scientist\))

