[PREV - GRACE_MACHINES]    [TOP]

JMC

                                                    February 06, 2018     
John McCarthy was becoming a                                              
controversial figure in a number               Reading histories         
of ways back when I was a                      of computers, I
graduate student at Stanford.                  note that I've met
                                               a lot of the people
He had been fairly left-wing                   under discussion...
when younger, but had veered                   to the point where
to the right by the mid-80s.                   it seems strange that,
                                               for example, I never
   You can see how things like this            met Englebart.
   can happen if you're familiar with
   what the 70s political scene was like.          Anyway, John McCarthy was
   John Markoff tells an anecdote about            very active on usenet (and
   McCarthy trying to get a re-affirmation         the TOPS-20 bboards) when I
   of non-violence from a local co-op              showed up at Stanford, and
   that had been co-opted by Maoists--             I later signed up for a
   they responded with a death threat.             "Values, Technology and
                                                   Society" symposium he was
   By the 1980s, he was inclined to take           teaching.
   the conservative side on most issues--
   there was one memorable post where he
   somewhat randomly expressed anti-Islamic
   sentiment, essentially writing off the       You might compare all
   mid-east as barbarians.  In follow up        this to the case of
   remarks he admitted he'd been wrong on       Jensen, though I think
   the specific issue, but without actually     that was more extreme on
   retracting or apologizing for the            all counts-- inventing
   broader anti-Islamic attitude, a fact        the transistor and then
   that stuck in the minds of a number of       becoming a defender of
   people I met-- Stanford has always had       white supremacy.
   quite a few international students
   visiting from abroad.

   John McCarthy had his hand in many
   technical developments over the years--          Actually, Lisp was
   he was famous for being the inventor of          originally intended as a
   the Lisp language, and oddly enough he           very abstract theoretical
   was not famous for having invented               language, it was an
   multiprocess concurrency (aka                    intentionally simplified
   "time-sharing"), but he really was the           intellectual construct
   one who came up with the idea.                   you could use to think
                                                    about computer languages.
          This seemed like a really
          fantastic claim, and there were           One of McCarthy's
          people who really didn't want             students, as I remember it,
          to believe it-- I expect                  had the idea of actually
          because of political                      implementing it.
          disagreements.  McCarthy put a
          copy of the original paper on             McCarthy's initial reaction:
          the subject up on his website.            "I think you're confusing
                                                    theory and practice."


   In the 90s era, McCarthy had not by any means
   dropped his main lines of research -- he could
   meet accusations that he was over-the-hill with
   the fact that his recent papers were still
   highly cited (e.g. on "elephant").


   Though he seemed to be putting in a lot of
   energy into discussions of miscellanious
   subjects on-line-- as was I, for that
   matter--  Notably, he was very active on
   sci.environment, where some people give him
   credit for being one of the first to raise
   the subject of global warming amelioration
   technologies.






--------
[NEXT - ENGLEBART]