John McCarthy, creator of Lisp, dead at 84.

[KingNothing]

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/creator-of-lisp-john-mccarthy-dead-at-84/

Rest in parentheses, my friend.

 

[micromass]

RIP!

The creator of the most beautiful language on Earth is gone

 

[Borek]

Is this a season for programming language creators, or what?

I never used Lisp for programming work, but it reminds me something.

Many years ago (around 1988 or 89), when I was working at Warsaw University, we bought an automatic polarographic system. Part of the system was an RS-232 controlled plotter. I was tasked with attaching the plotter to PC, so that we could use it for drawing calculated theoretical voltammetric curves. There was no drivers, and in general at these early times using RS-232 was a PITA, as drivers buily into DOS were a joke - they didn't work with anything. We had full specifications both of RS-232 of the plotter (to make things more difficult RS-232 devices were often incompatible) and the controlling commands, but I wasn't able to make it work. However, I discovered that it works correctly with pirated version of AutoCAD we had in office. And AutoCAD had built in interpreter of Lisp and some examples of how to use this Lisp interpreter to prepare drawings. So I wrote a small program that was taking our data and converting it into series of Lisp commands. These were imported into AutoCAD, drawn there, and finally transferred on paper.