John McCarthy, inventor of the Lisp programming language and one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, died yesterday at the age of 84, said in a Tweet a teacher at Stanford University.
His adventure began with LISP at MIT in 1958 with its publication of the article "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their evaluation by Machine, Part I". LISP is the second programming language (relatively) high-level after Fortran.
After a huge hit with developers, LISP is still used, although more present in dialects such as Scheme and Common Lisp.
The story will be selected McCarthy as the first man to set out the concept of artificial intelligence, he had described in 1955 as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."
Optimist, he believes that aspects of human intelligence could be described with sufficient precision for a machine can be programmed to simulate them, and despite the hardware limitations of the time he considered surmountable .
The biggest obstacle facing the discipline he had invented was none other than "our inability to write programs that would draw the most out of what we have," he noted in a research proposal in 1955 . LISP was born four years later.
Since then and until 2000, John McCarthy has taught at Stanford University, after a brief stint at Princeton, Dartmouth and MIT.
McCarthy was awarded the Turing Award in 1972 and received the prestigious National Medal of Science in the United States.
The mower of claim in October Will he finally stop?
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