This has got to be the most depressing month in awhile.
John McCarthy Has Died
111–120 of 231 posts
Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#112Isn't there something about deaths happening in 3s? 1. Steve Jobs 2. Dennis Ritchie 3. John McCarthy
Let's hope that it is limited to 3. I get terribly antsy just thinking about who else in computing has reached their 70's and 80's.
Agreed, and the close proximity of their deaths makes me think that that's it for a set of 3.
Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#113Oh no! Lisp has a huge impact on computing. It's hard to imagine how old it is.
It is 53 years old. You don't have to "imagine" how old it is.
53 years are like an eon in computing. Probably older than most of us. It's hard to imagine because it is very much relevant today despite its old age.
RIP.
Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#114Death date removed from Wikipedia. Latest edit shows: "(Protected John McCarthy (computer scientist): Violations of the biographies of living persons policy: Rumors of his death added to page. May be true, but better to wait than edit war."
Death date now reinstated. (22:09 BST, 21:09 Zulu)
I reverted it again. I feel terrible doing that but the alternative is sourcing our article from personal communications or a tweet. Have yet to see a reference which is reliable (in the wikipedia sense) or not ultimately derived from the original edit to wikipedia.
Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#115I never understood why McCarthy was never featured at YC or Startupschool. Listening & being able to ask McCarthy questions would have been like peering into the past & future at the same time.
Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#116What a pity. I sense a black bar coming. The last few weeks have been terrible, one icon after another has fallen. What is different from other fields is that computing is still a young enough field that almost all of its luminaries except for the earliest ones are still alive. I fear the avalanche has only barely begun, and at some point the frequency of these will become high enough that either we will stop to noti…
Eventually, I think, there will cease to be icons within the industry. What we have now are the people who invented the internet/computers and the basic components. The people who are doing the inventing now are just as smart, but they aren't creating fundamental things, they are improving on an existing system. We don't say, "engineer team y invented the iCore series of processors." we sort of just say "Intel is com…
I think the distinction you're highlighting is between the people who start the giant companies of the industry, and the people who keep those companies successful. Everyone knows that Noyce/Moore/Grove built Intel, not many people knows who runs it today.
The '50s computing leaders (mostly academics) are in their old age, the '70s leaders (academics and businessmen) are heading into retirement (except for Jobs unfortunately), and the later leaders (Google, Facebook) are still going strong.
Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I did a quick Google News search and turned up nothing. Could be legit, or vandalism, but there's really no way to know until we have confirmation. - --EDIT-- Since I wrote this, I've seen one source appear, in Portuguese[1]. It's still unclear whether this story is legitimate, or if they simply copied wikipedia / the buzz surrounding the story. - --EDIT 2-- Globo is apparently the largest media conglomerate…
*Portuguese
Fixed, much obliged.
Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#118Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#119What a pity. I sense a black bar coming. The last few weeks have been terrible, one icon after another has fallen. What is different from other fields is that computing is still a young enough field that almost all of its luminaries except for the earliest ones are still alive. I fear the avalanche has only barely begun, and at some point the frequency of these will become high enough that either we will stop to noti…
Eventually, I think, there will cease to be icons within the industry. What we have now are the people who invented the internet/computers and the basic components. The people who are doing the inventing now are just as smart, but they aren't creating fundamental things, they are improving on an existing system. We don't say, "engineer team y invented the iCore series of processors." we sort of just say "Intel is com…
Between Gates, Zuckerberg, Larry and Sergey, Torvalds, RMS, Knuth, and a few others, there're still plenty of icons left and so I don't forsee your scenario happening anytime soon. I am generally an optimist, and think the number of icons to come is far greater than those who have come and gone.
Re: John McCarthy Has Died
#120I never understood why McCarthy was never featured at YC or Startupschool. Listening & being able to ask McCarthy questions would have been like peering into the past & future at the same time.
Here's a recent interview with him -- an excellent way to understand his perspective on the future of programming languages: