John McCarthy, Father of AI and LISP passes...

[xytroxon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCar ... scientist)

[TedWalther]

Eleven years ago, in the year 2000, I tried to set up a meeting with him through his grad student, Alexander Stepanov. Stepanov was showing us the future of Aspect based programming, which hadn't been released at that time. The same Stepanov that added STL for templates to C++. Stepanov said there was no point, as McCarthy was "quite mad" or senile by that time. I hope he went peacefully. First Dennis RItchie, now McCarthy. Who is next?

[Lutz]

I always thought Aspect Oriented Programming would bring Dynamic Scoping back in fashion:

http://www.p-cos.net/documents/dynfun.pdf

[newdep]

I just want to say "Thanks for all the fun!".. god bless..

Its a very odd year this 2011 where it seems a lot of great sources of mind and being pass away,
in the age of science and computers the heritage is there to be used..


Thanks for the information i realy did miss the news on McCarthy.

[TedWalther]

My mistake, it wasn't aspect oriented programming. Stepanov was working on concept oriented programming, and making a language to support it. I saw him just a day or two after he deleted all of the LISP code he had used to prototype and develop the STL stuff that went into C++.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept-oriented_model

[TedWalther]

http://conceptoriented.org/wiki/Concept ... rogramming

[TedWalther]

Interesting quote on OO programming:

Question:

I think STL and Generic Programming mark a definite departure from the common C++ programming style, which I find is almost completely derived from SmallTalk. Do you agree?

Answer:

Yes. STL is not object oriented. I think that object orientedness is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence. I have yet to see an interesting piece of code that comes from these OO people. In a sense, I am unfair to AI: I learned a lot of stuff from the MIT AI Lab crowd, they have done some really fundamental work: BillGosper?'s Hakmem is one of the best things for a programmer to read. AI might not have had a serious foundation, but it produced Gosper and RichardStallman (Emacs), Moses (Macsyma) and GeraldSussman (Scheme, together with GuySteele). I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need multisorted algebras - families of interfaces that span multiple types. I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting - saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all. I find OOP methodologically wrong. It starts with classes. It is as if mathematicians would start with axioms. You do not start with axioms - you start with proofs. Only when you have found a bunch of related proofs, can you come up with axioms. You end with axioms. The same thing is true in programming: you have to start with interesting algorithms. Only when you understand them well, can you come up with an interface that will let them work.