At this Papers We Love Berlin Meetup we will have Marijn Haverbeke (https://twitter.com/marijnjh) presenting the original Lisp paper "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine" by John McCarthy.



PDF: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf



Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting this event!



Abstract:



There are works that, rather than continuing in an existing research tradition, invent a whole new direction. John McCarthy's original paper on Lisp is definitely one such work. It obviously set the stage for the various Lisps and Lisp-inspired languages, but it also pioneered a number of concepts, ranging from garbage collection to the call stack, that are deeply ingrained in today's programming reality. This talk will be mostly about historical perspective (and will not involve Lisp smugness or propaganda).



Bio:



Marijn Haverbeke spent his early career living in the past and programming Common Lisp. When reality finally caught up with him he gave that up and became a JavaScript programmer instead. Author of CodeMirror and Eloquent JavaScript. Contributor to the Rust compiler.