An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions (1958) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions (1958) [pdf]

softwarepreservation.org

171 pointskbp12 comments

Reading this my eye was caught by the name Gelernter. Wait, wasn't that the guy who... no, it was his father, Herbert[1], who

> implemented, with Nathaniel Rochester, a computer language for list processing within FORTRAN ... the Fortran list processing language (FLPL)

His son David, who would have been 3yo at the time McCarthy wrote this paper, has had his own effect on computer science[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Gelernter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter

Page 10. A description of a linked list, and the memory structures required to intermingle them.

Incredibly simple, powerful, and to my eyes, beautiful.

They've got some interesting content http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/

A lot of ideas about what was only theoretically possible at the time - good time to revisit.

It [the language] is not so convenient for representing lists of fixed length where one frequently wants the nth element where n is computed rather than obtained by adding 1 to n-1.

I find this is an interesting way of saying it, it made me think for a moment..

Reading this I get an urge to reach back in time and tell the author about all the amazing programs and languages this work will lead to, about Emacs, Scheme, Clojure, ...

He found out. Not sure he used any Clojure.

For anyone interested in additional context, the paper "AI and the Origins of the Functional Programming Language Style " by Mark Priestley is a great introduction: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-017-9432-7 (sorry, I don't have a non-paywalled link, but SciHub does the trick).

Here's a PDF from the author's site:

http://www.markpriestley.net/pdfs/AIandFunctionalStyle.pdf

Another classic paper by John McCarthy, the father of Lisp and much of early AI.

For anyone wondering about the source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scient...

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