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From: Julieta Shem <jshem@yaxenu.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp history: IF, etc.
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2024 17:56:31 -0300
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Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> writes:

> Alan Bawden <alan@csail.mit.edu> writes:
>> It's a common misconception that McCarthy was trying to turn Lambda
>> Calculus into a programming language. ...  He added LAMBDA (and LABEL)
>> because he needed LAMBDA in order to define recursive functions, but
>> as he himself often admitted, he didn't really understand Lambda
>> Calculus, he just needed the notation.  
>
> I see, yes, and this is confirmed by his History of Lisp article.  His
> Wikipedia biography also surprised me a bit.  For some reason I had
> thought of him as an academic mathematical logician who later somehow
> got involved with computers, but it was more like the other way around.
> Thanks.

His PhD was in mathematics---differential equations.  He would think up
things like a simple function that is continuous but nowhere
differentiable on the real line [1].  He was a mathematician by all
accounts.  It's pretty hard to remove mathematics from computer science.
The culture seems to be that if a mathematician contributes more to the
field of computer science, he is called a computer scientist.

I also agree that he was a logician: he worked on a mathematical basis
for computer science.  A mathematical basis for computer science must be
classified as logic.  He was interested in proving programs were
correct.  His idea of a conditional expression is precisely to write
mathematical functions in high precision.  Mathematics in high
precision---that's a logician.

The creation of LISP by John McCarthy was surely not at first with
intention of a programming language.  In fact, it was Steve Russell, his
student at the time, that first had the idea of implementing EVAL and
did it.  I believe McCarthy was even somewhat surprised because, then,
he did not think of LISP having that kind of purpose.

[1] https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/weierstrass.pdf