Bob,
First, I share your admiration for John McCarthy (after all, who does
not?). In that spirit, my understanding was that LISP was an homage,
and as such should not be viewed in a negative light. You're of course
right that we do stand on shoulders– many.
Eliot
On 10/27/11 11:08 PM, Bob Hinden wrote:
John McCarthy died a few days ago. I won't try to summarize his
accomplishments myself but thought that the obituary in the NY Times was very
good:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html
"John McCarthy, a computer scientist who helped design the foundation of
today’s Internet-based computing and who is widely credited with coining the
term for a frontier of research he helped pioneer, Artificial Intelligence,
or A.I., died on Monday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 84.
....
In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
It was at M.I.T. that he began working on what he called List Processing
Language, or Lisp, a computer language that became the standard tool for
artificial intelligence research and design."
With his death, I have a request.
I request that the relevant authors and IETF working group rename what it
currently calls "LISP" to something else. To put it politely, the IETF
should be standing on the shoulders of the giants who have laid the
groundwork of the Internet, not stepping on their toes.
Bob
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