[Cs254f11] RIP John McCarthy

[Lee Spector]

Since we're deep in Lisp in this course I thought it'd be appropriate to pass along the sad news that John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp, father of AI, and giant of computer science more generally, has died. There should be a bunch of obits popping up in the media if you want to know more about him. But for you guys I thought I should also pass along this epitaph, from the clojure list:

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Here lies a Lisper
Uninterned from this mortal package
Yet not gc'd
While we retain pointers to his memory

Source - https://twitter.com/#!/mtraven/status/128603266933198848
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("Packages" are Common Lisp's closest equivalents to Clojure namespaces.)

 -Lee

--
Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002-3359
lspector at hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438