I thought this was great. Newell & Simon are sort of heroes of mine, and I enjoyed hearing McCarthy's view of the relation of Lisp to IPL & Fortran (from Backus). Are there any good biographies of these people? (I know that Simon wrote an autobiography, but I haven't read it.)
The summary of the big ideas/innovations from Lisp was pretty awesome -- programs as data, first-class functions, an expression-oriented language, eval as a Turing-complete function, garbage collection, linked lists, etc.
Guy Steele mentions he is standing in for Alan Kay. I wish whoever arranged that would put together a panel discussion with Alan Kay and Guy Steele talking about programming languages... or pretty much anything...
The summary of the big ideas/innovations from Lisp was pretty awesome -- programs as data, first-class functions, an expression-oriented language, eval as a Turing-complete function, garbage collection, linked lists, etc.
Guy Steele mentions he is standing in for Alan Kay. I wish whoever arranged that would put together a panel discussion with Alan Kay and Guy Steele talking about programming languages... or pretty much anything...