
Annotated Version of John McCarthy’s Paper on Lisp - fermatslibrary
http://fermatslibrary.com/s/recursive-functions-of-symbolic-expressions-and-their-computation-by-machine
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leoc
Herbert Stoyan's historical work on early Lisp
[http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2010/07/29/185/](http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2010/07/29/185/)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20050617031004/http://www8.infor...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050617031004/http://www8.informatik.uni-
erlangen.de/html/lisp-enter.html) is probably worth reading if one is
seriously interested. (I haven't read much of it myself yet.) McCarthy praised
Stoyan's work as better than his own 1979 HOPL paper ( [http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html](http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html) ): "Stoyan's reading of the
early LISP documents gives a more accurate picture than my own memories turned
out to have given." [http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/](http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/)

(As a side-note, I'm pretty sure that the broken, Wayback-beating link to
"Lisp references according to Miller" on McCarthy's page is to this
[http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/Lisp-
Hist...](http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/Lisp-History.html)
document by Kent Pitman and Brad Miller (see
[http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-
site/alu/table/history.h...](http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-
site/alu/table/history.htm) ).)

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agumonkey
Beautiful, I often dig for lisp history but never heard of this.

Also, even though very subjective, I often conflat functional programming and
lisp and recently found "some history of functional languages" by D.Turner
which list the ml lineage nicely [http://www-fp.cs.st-
andrews.ac.uk/tifp/TFP2012/TFP_2012/Turn...](http://www-fp.cs.st-
andrews.ac.uk/tifp/TFP2012/TFP_2012/Turner.pdf)

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daveloyall
Dear fermatslibrary,

Every time I try to read an annotated paper on your site, I spent a full
minute clicking the left margin and the paper, back and forth, trying to get a
single view that shows all the annotations.

My monitor is huge and I like to read a whole document, top to bottom, by
click-holding my scroll bar once and dragging (up and down) until I am done.

~~~
fermatslibrary
Hi daveloyall, Thanks for the feedback. We are probably going to release a new
version of this interface in a few weeks. We are planning to have the sidebar
always visible (once you click in a comment) and then update the comments
while the user navigates the paper, so that you don't have to click in every
comment.

~~~
iconjack
Are the only ways to sign up (in order to contribute) either facebook or
google?

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kragen
I get a spam popup ad when I open this link. After closing it, when I click
one "annotation" to be able to read it, it opens in a sidebar and all the
others disappear. Closing the sidebar doesn't make them reappear. Reloading
the page does, but as soon as I click on one inane annotation, all the others
disappear again.

All in all, a very frustrating experience.

I recommend just downloading the original PDF instead: [http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf](http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf)

Then, you know you have the paper, and can share it with other people in the
future, without some fly-by-night startup injecting spam popups or going under
and invalidating the URL.

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vzaliva
I was looking forward to reading insightful comments on this seminal paper.
However I was disappointed by overall quality of the current annotations. Many
are about how it translates to Clojure syntax (why not Common LISP or
Scheme?). Others are trivialities like "apply and eval are the Maxwell's
equations of lisp." I think fermatslibrary.com is a great idea, but this
particular example does not do it justice.

~~~
aiokos
I agree. The Clojure syntax comparisons are probably due to the popularity of
that language, compared to Scheme or other Lisp dialects. Perhaps a comment
section in addition to the annotations would provide more insightful
discussions.

~~~
pjmlp
Yeah to many of us old timers, it feels strange when new FP afficionados only
know about Clojure and Haskell like languages, without realising that we
already were doing FP for a few generations even if the languages never became
mainstream.

On the other hand, it is great that those people jump in with their new ideas
and help the community go forward.

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karamazov
I had a chance to add the first few annotations. Happy to answer questions on
the paper as best I can.

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JBiserkov
Paul Graham has a great take on this[1]. Someone should make a PDF from the
postscript file and upload it somewhere.

[1]
[http://paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html](http://paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html)

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chmaynard
On a Mac, Safari converts the postscript to a PDF on the fly when you click on
the postscript link in the article.

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JBiserkov
That's great!

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mcnamaratw
Nice site.Good choices for papers.

The top border kind of smushes down on me sometimes. It would be nice if I
could resize. Hm, and it doesn't seem to keep me logged in, so every time I
connect it asks me to subscribe again.

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md11235
Any chances that this nice tool will be open-sourced?

It would be really convenient to use it as an intra research group discussion
on papers.

~~~
fermatslibrary
Hi md11235! We are thinking about allowing Fermat's Library to be used inside
research groups as well. Shoot us an email with some more information about
the use case you're envisioning so that we can set things up:
team@fermatslibrary.com

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cconroy
It is a shame this work is relegated to mainly niche. Am i wrong for saying
this?

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aiokos
Does Fermat's Library offer a printer-friendly version of the paper?

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seesomesense
The paper is a classic. The annotations are rubbish.

