[Cs254f11] more on McCarthy and Lisp

[Lee Spector]

Paul Graham, the great Lisp evangelist and co-founder of Y Combinator, wrote a piece back in 2001 in which he claimed that McCarthy "did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry" and I think that's both correct and important. Graham's paper is dense but deep...

It's at http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html.

BTW it uses Common Lisp (not Clojure or Scheme, but the principles are the same although some of the details are different).

--
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