Marvin Minsky - The beauty of the Lisp language (44/151)

To hear more of Marvin Minsky’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB2SsvcECzI&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxJatFYBb7P4NZscvJw1f0r

The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes]

TRANSCRIPT: John McCarthy was a good programmer; I was a… not very good programmer and he had invented this wonderful language called Lisp, which was based on the nice language that Newell and Simon had invented called… no, it’s called IPL, Information Processing Language. IPL is made of little atoms and it’s very tedious, and McCarthy’s invention was… it was more like FORTRAN, which was… which is a language… IPL just had little instructions, FORTRAN has statements, make this true, and Lisp had statements with a very clean syntax. It only had… it basically has five basic verbs, whereas FORTRAN has a big mass of arbitrary… has a big library, and so McCarthy’s was a very elegant cleaning up of… of computer science. And thereafter, there were two kinds of languages, the algebraic language FORTRAN, and this recursive language call… based on Lisp, which… they’re now dying out because of… in a Lisp program, you can write a program that writes Lisp programs so it has a kind of open future; now, no… no-one actually does that yet, but it’s still possible. In the other languages, it's almost… you can’t write a C program that will write a C program, it’s just… there aren’t any verbs of the right kind, so to me programming hasn’t changed much in 50 years because they got locked into this… strange set of limitations.

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