Thimbles & Care

This morning comes the news that John McCarthy, creator of Lisp, has died.

I always thought the story of how he wrote the first Lisp interpreter was interesting. McCarthy and his students had developed Lisp notation, but they heard how much effort went into the Fortran compiler and didn’t think they had the resources for that, so when they actually wanted to run a program they translated it to machine code by hand. Then McCarthy wrote a paper showing that Lisp was Turing-complete, and in the process he wrote an eval function that could interpret an arbitrary Lisp expression. When one of his grad students read the paper, he realized that once they translated that function to machine code they would have an interpreter that could run any Lisp program, and they wouldn’t have to translate by hand any more.

I’ve been pondering what I might say about the passing of Steve Jobs last week. I’ve used Macs the entire time I’ve worked at the University and the year before I started here I taught Computer Literacy and Programming to Middle School and High School kinds on Apple ][e’s, so he’s unquestionably had an effect on my life. Unlike most geeks, Jobs never forgot that computers are used by human beings, and we need more of that.

This morning I saw reports that Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and one of the original developers on Unix, has also died. Tim Bray has a remembrance. C has never been my favorite programming language (and while the comments on this at Bray’s post were tacky I have to share the doubts about null-terminated byte strings being a good idea) but he certainly did a lot to push the use of computers forward.

It won’t be too much longer until the “digital natives” will outnumber those of us who grew up in a world without ubiquitous computing. I hope we don’t forget the people who made it happen.