Lambda the Ultimate

It is being reported that John McCarthy has passed. Here is an example article which I list only for confirmation of something I heard from a friend.

John McCarthy, the creator of the Lisp programming language and a pioneer in artificial intelligence, has died. He was 84.

I hope that LtU'ers will comment appropriately.

My personal and very indirect remembrance is quite simple: In the late 1980s, as a high school student fascinated by computers but with only limited access to any and with even more limited access to education about them -- I went trolling what bookstores I could find that might have something to offer. I was not rich but I could afford a few bucks to take a commuter train 40 miles to Boston. Once in Boston, I learned how to navigate to Cambridge, near Harvard. Once there I found the Harvard Coop. Once at the Coop I learned where to find textbooks. And there, very early on in my experience with computing, I found a reprint of the Lisp 1.5 manual. I recognized it as "dated" (even then) very quickly but I also was blown away by the presentation of (more or less) a meta-circular eval. The handling of m- vs. s-expressions also demystified for my then quite naive, unworldly self a lot about the nonthreatening, practical, and banal nature of many notational choices. I don't know... I'm certainly not the right person to sing the man's praises other than to say that his work touched my life in a big positive way that is hard to sum up.