An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions (1958) [pdf]

fernly · on July 31, 2017

Reading this my eye was caught by the name Gelernter. Wait, wasn't that the guy who... no, it was his father, Herbert[1], who

> implemented, with Nathaniel Rochester, a computer language for list processing within FORTRAN ... the Fortran list processing language (FLPL)

His son David, who would have been 3yo at the time McCarthy wrote this paper, has had his own effect on computer science[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Gelernter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter

shakna · on July 30, 2017

Page 10. A description of a linked list, and the memory structures required to intermingle them.

Incredibly simple, powerful, and to my eyes, beautiful.

newman8r · on July 30, 2017

They've got some interesting content http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/

A lot of ideas about what was only theoretically possible at the time - good time to revisit.

cjauvin · on July 30, 2017

It [the language] is not so convenient for representing lists of fixed length where one frequently wants the nth element where n is computed rather than obtained by adding 1 to n-1.

I find this is an interesting way of saying it, it made me think for a moment..

JBiserkov · on July 30, 2017

Reading this I get an urge to reach back in time and tell the author about all the amazing programs and languages this work will lead to, about Emacs, Scheme, Clojure, ...

sitkack · on July 30, 2017

He found out. Not sure he used any Clojure.

tpetricek · on July 30, 2017

For anyone interested in additional context, the paper "AI and the Origins of the Functional Programming Language Style " by Mark Priestley is a great introduction: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-017-9432-7 (sorry, I don't have a non-paywalled link, but SciHub does the trick).

shanusmagnus · on July 31, 2017

Here's a PDF from the author's site:

http://www.markpriestley.net/pdfs/AIandFunctionalStyle.pdf

seesomesense · on July 31, 2017

Another classic paper by John McCarthy, the father of Lisp and much of early AI.

johnhenry · on July 30, 2017

For anyone wondering about the source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scient...

john255 · on July 30, 2017

[flagged]

dang · on July 30, 2017

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886673 and marked it off-topic.

Devagamster · on July 30, 2017

there's that hacker news ray of sunshine I've grown to know and love :) glad all is right in the world