Quotes about McCarthy

The laws of mathematics supposedly derive from the rules of logic. But there is no argument for the rules of logic that does not presuppose them.

Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone. She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.

I want pockets in my dresses. I put pockets in everything! I want pockets inside my pockets.

Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.

I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it

Commend him gently, whom the wrath he suckled at his heart has wasted more than years.

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.