
John McCarthy on Elephant 2000, Lisp, Ruby and the Computer Industry (2008) - zooso
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/mccarthy-elephant-2000
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aurora72
John McCarthy's videos are rare and it's great to see him talking. It's been
said that LISP (alternatively J. McCarthy) borrowed the concept of functional
closures from APL in mid 60's, that is McCarthy was not the original thinker
of closures.

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calibraxis
Do you mean PAL, not APL? (PAL's initial implementation was in Lisp, FWIW.)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28computer_programming...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%28computer_programming%29)

My (probably bad) knowledge of history is that the Lisps didn't do lexical
scoping particularly well until Scheme. (Hopefully I don't have a false sense
of "closures" vs. "lexical scoping".)

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aurora72
Yes I meant APL, not PAL. By functional closures, I tried to mean functions as
first-class objects, i.e. ability to pass them as arguments or store them in
data structures, etc.

I had read this in an article about Ruby, AFAIK. It was talking about Ruby (or
alternatively "Matz") borrowing many principles from LISP and there the author
had mentioned Lisp's functions being first-class objects were adopted from
APL. I should find that article to clear the things up.

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justin66
He has such a great command of the subject and of related disciplines like
logic and philosophy. It's interesting that he really kind of kept to himself
over the decades rather than speaking more.

