John McCarthy 1927-2011

After Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie, computing has lost its third pioneer in a fortnight.

John McCarthy left MIT long before I arrived but his influence was still very apparent. When Stanford decided to make a play to become the MIT of the West back in the 1960s, McCarthy was one of the first people they hired to form the nucleus of their Computer Science group.

McCarthy was the father of LISP, the first functional programming language. While most of the obituaries of Dennis Ritchie mention his work on UNIX. His much more important claim to fame in my view was that he was the creator of C which is still one of the most widely used programming languages and the foundation for Objective C, C# and Java.