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John McCarthy Has Died

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Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#144
This is my favorite John McCarthy story.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803627

I like how one simple succinct relevant question can say so much about Norvig's claims. It seems appropriate coming from the creator of LISP. And, of course, the mutual respect, professionalism they both had to leave it at that.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#145
post #130
post #54

Visionary. Shine On! "His 2001 short story The Robot and the Baby[9] lightheartedly explored the question of whether robots should have (or simulate having) emotions, and anticipated aspects of Internet culture and social networking that became more prominent in the ensuing decade."

Can be found here: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby...

thanks a lot. will read soon.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#146
post #36

Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, and now John McCarthy - maybe some truth that deaths always come in 3's. Quite unnerving. We should propose National Computing Month or something for October.

You can take any arbitrary, long running sequence and partition it into threes. Also: selection bias.

To quote the wise _Principia Discordia_:

> "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#147
post #52

(he (will (be (dearly (missed)))))

Whenever people make Lisp jokes by nesting parentheses without regard for the semantics that they denote, I get a little disappointed. It's not anger, nor contempt; just a feeling that we can do better. (will-be 'john-mccarthy (modifier 'missed 'dearly)) Incidentally, "I feel like we can do better" would probably be a pretty good summary of what John McCarthy was about.

Or,

    (assert (equal 'dearly (missed-amount 'john-mccarthy)))

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#148
"If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry."

— John McCarthy (speaking at the MIT Centennial in 1961).

It's been pointed out that McCarthy used the term "utility" rather than "cloud", but many of us would argue they are one and the same. Indeed Wikipedia defines it as:

"Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet)."

In any case, can anyone think of anyone more deserving of the honour of the title "father of cloud computing" than McCarthy? I certainly can't.

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