
Guy Steele Interviews John McCarthy, Father of Lisp - alrex021
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Steele-Interviews-John-McCarthy
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andreyf
Great interview, but I hate how infoq pushes the transcript into that tiny
box.

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sp332
Interestingly, the Readability bookmarklet picks out the transcript perfectly.
<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

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dpritchett
Chrome users are highly advised to pick up the Readability Redux extension. It
has been consistently faster for me than the bookmarklet - reformatted results
are effectively instant now.

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamnea...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamneaacmfoipeehedigia)

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jodrellblank
That read a lot like the recent Bill Watterson interview.

Fans: Blah blah blah invention of lisp 50 years ago?

McCarthy: I don't know, I can't remember that far back in that much detail and
it doesn't matter now anyway; can't you move on and ask me something about my
recent work and stop objectifying me as some kind of ancient artifact?

Fans: Thanks for the interview, we all appreciate you inventing Lisp!

McCarthy: {smiles through tensed jaw muscles and compressed lips}

* Implied content, they didn't actually say these things.

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danblick
I thought this was great. Newell & Simon are sort of heroes of mine, and I
enjoyed hearing McCarthy's view of the relation of Lisp to IPL & Fortran (from
Backus). Are there any good biographies of these people? (I know that Simon
wrote an autobiography, but I haven't read it.)

The summary of the big ideas/innovations from Lisp was pretty awesome --
programs as data, first-class functions, an expression-oriented language, eval
as a Turing-complete function, garbage collection, linked lists, etc.

Guy Steele mentions he is standing in for Alan Kay. I wish whoever arranged
that would put together a panel discussion with Alan Kay and Guy Steele
talking about programming languages... or pretty much anything...

