
Guy Steele Interviews John McCarthy at OOPSLA 2008 - apu
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Steele-Interviews-John-McCarthy
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parenthesis
The transcription is slightly crazy in parts: "Prologue", "girdle numbers" (my
favourite), "picks my curiosity" … .

Unfortunately, McCarthy seems to misunderstand Kent Pitman's question about
dynamic vs. static typing as having to do with dynamic vs. static (lexical)
variable scoping.

The most interesting thing, for me, was the idea that it was because McCarthy
never tried to be the 'boss' of Lisp that there has always been so much
diversity and innovation in Lisp(s).

~~~
mahmud
He never tried to be the boss, but that doesn't mean he didn't put his foot
down when he needed to. He pretty much killed ISO ISLisp, International
Standard Lisp, a competing Lisp standardization effort that was a subset of
Common Lisp just about the same size and flavor of Dylan. The ISLisp guys
where mostly European lispers who were excluded from the Common Lisp ANSI
standardization process, which was mostly an American venture backed by the
DoD.

McCarthy didn't see technical merit to their claim for a separate standard,
and he barred them from calling it "Standard Lisp". The wounds healed and the
community reunited, but still, if the Europeans had a seat at the table we
might have gotten a layered language, with a tiny kernel and several higher-
level extensions, where vendors could advertise adherence to a Lisp "level"
(e.g. "CL0" being a tiny Lispy VM with GC and LAP assembly, CL1 being
primitive datatypes and special forms, and so on.)

------
delano
_GS: Do you think there is anything peculiar or special about the design of
Lisp that encouraged that experimentation or made it easier?_

 _JM: Sure. There was no boss. I never attempted to be the boss._

