John McCarthy died a few days ago. I won't try to summarize his accomplishments myself but thought that the obituary in the NY Times was very good:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html "John McCarthy, a computer scientist who helped design the foundation of today’s Internet-based computing and who is widely credited with coining the term for a frontier of research he helped pioneer, Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., died on Monday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 84. .... In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was at M.I.T. that he began working on what he called List Processing Language, or Lisp, a computer language that became the standard tool for artificial intelligence research and design." With his death, I have a request. I request that the relevant authors and IETF working group rename what it currently calls "LISP" to something else. To put it politely, the IETF should be standing on the shoulders of the giants who have laid the groundwork of the Internet, not stepping on their toes. Bob _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
