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John McCarthy Has Died

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Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#171

Post by protagonist_h »

TruthElixirX wrote: post #105
0x12 wrote: post #92

What 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…

Fundamental inventions and discoveries are never recognized right away. That's why Nobel prizes are usually awarded for a work done several decades ago. The guys who do revolutionary work in computing right now do exist, we just haven't recognized them yet.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#172

Post by papa_bear »

phillmv wrote: post #156
dlss wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Death is necessary for human ecology Ugh, not now. References or stop talking. I have my fingers crossed he was signed up for cryonics. This is tragic.

It's how any species gets to iterate. The old have to die off to make room for the young.

Right, but if there is actually any selection for aging and death in organisms (maybe there is, I'm not sure), it's not useful anymore. There's a lot of evidence that there's no longer genetic selection acting on the human population, and it's therefore no longer true that our children should be genetically superior.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#175

Post by prodigal_erik »

rayiner wrote: post #162
jrockway wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really fair to compare Zuckerberg to Knuth? Zuckerberg made a PHP site for people to stalk their classmates. Knuth wrote TeX, hundreds of papers, and a series of books considered among the 100 most important scientific works of the 20th century. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-boo... Zuckerberg is definitely a successful dude that one can look up to. But in terms of advancing the field…

Your comment presupposes that advances in mathematics are more important than advances in social communication. Is Mozart less iconic because his achievements were in music?

I think it's more about how hard it is than how important. Facebook represents a lot of work but nothing that seems to demand superhuman insight; an army of Stanford CS grads supplied with pot and Red Bull could probably make a tolerable substitute in five or ten years. But it's far from certain any of them could ever produce the kind of work Turing or McCarthy brought us. (And I say this knowing I won't, either.)

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#177

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #162
jrockway wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really fair to compare Zuckerberg to Knuth? Zuckerberg made a PHP site for people to stalk their classmates. Knuth wrote TeX, hundreds of papers, and a series of books considered among the 100 most important scientific works of the 20th century. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-boo... Zuckerberg is definitely a successful dude that one can look up to. But in terms of advancing the field…

Your comment presupposes that advances in mathematics are more important than advances in social communication. Is Mozart less iconic because his achievements were in music?

[deleted]

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#178

Post by jcromartie »

I got into programming through Logo in elementary school. Logo is a Lisp dialect. Even if it took me 15 years to rediscover Lisp, I am thankful for the good beginnings.

Thanks to John McCarthy for making such huge contributions to the computing world, and to my hobby and career.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#180

Post by bad_user »

wisty wrote: post #154
redthrowaway wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hate to sound negative, but things won't get better. OK, this month has been a shocker, but next year might be just as bad. The real fundamentals of computing happened a long time ago. Hero of Alexandria, some Chinese and Islamic scholars, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Marie Jacquard, Turing, non Neumann. But progress was linear, not exponential - the tools they made were so im…

    It's easier to write git if you have a CVS repo 
    to store your work in
Not to diminish your point or anything, but regarding Git, I'll just quote Linus Tolvards:

    For the first 10 years of kernel maintenance, we 
    literally used tarballs and patches, which is a much
    superior source control management system than CVS is
Basically Git started as a bunch of scripts written by Linux for dealing with "tarballs and patches" and nobody starts something like this unless there's lots of hatred involved. What you get if you're a CVS user and want something better is SVN. You get Git when you consider CVS such an abomination that you'd rather do without any existing VCS altogether.

And I really think the world needs more people like Linus, as some wheels are worth reinventing.

    The real fundamentals of computing happened a long 
    time ago.
In the words of Alan Kay: The computer revolution hasn't happened yet ... http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521 (listen to this talk because it's great).
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