Due to health reasons, John McCarthy could not attend the conference. Alan Kay was (I hear) heading somewhere else in the evening– it would be a tight fit for his schedule if he was going to be there and also make his other “date”. Seeing as McCarthy couldn’t make it, Kay decided not to come. Instead, Guy Steele conducted the interview by phone.

(What as most striking to me about this was just how careful Steele was and how precise he was with his language. He appeared to already know the answers to all the questions… and if things got sidetracked or drifted off in a random or unclear direction, he always knew just what to say to pull things back together and pin things down. Just observing this interview process, it was clear that Guy was exactly the kind of person that you’d want to have running a massive language standards type project. It’s no accident that Steele is as influential as he is. He was very different from the traditional stereotype of a Lisp hacker. Throughout the day, I’d run into people and say… that’s Guy Steele over there! That’s the guy who wrote the lambda papers! Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to mean much to the typical conference goer….)

When asked what should have been added to Lisp, McCarthy said he would like to add some direct logic, but he didn’t know how to do that in a good way. Steele mentioned something about the Lisp-Prolog people in an aside. (I think Norvig implemented Prolog in Common Lisp in PAIP….)

When asked what separates a good programming language from a bad one, McCarthy said he had one advocacy: a language should have access to its own abstract syntax. Any program which works with programs involves abstract syntax. If you take Java and you want to write a program that deals with Java programs, then you’ve got to scan it and look up the plus sign and its precedents. (What a mess!)

Steele asked about the variation in the implementation of key-value pairs and association lisps. Was this an accident or a reinvention? McCarthy said he invented both– when he invented the second, he wasn’t thinking about what he’d done the first time.

Steele asked if s-expressions were good or bad. McCarthy said his original idea was to make it like Fortran. (With m-expressions, that is.) Steve Russel took McCarthy’s eval and said you could just program in s-expressions. Being a “conservative guy”, McCarthy thought this was a bad idea. Steele appeared to be slightly taken aback by the idea of such a revolutionary figure describing themselves as “conservative.” McCarthy said, “everybody’s conservative about what they’ve been doing.”

(I have several notes on the significance and uses of abstract syntax, but I don’t understand them. If anyone out there knows what he meant about having different versions of it– say, one to write in and one that’s pretty– then please help elucidate this. He also said something about not having really any good examples of Lisp programs that write programs. I think that’s what he said; I’d like to know more about this, too.)

Steele noted that most new languages have a “boss”. (Perl has Larry, Python has Guido, etc.) Steele then asked who was that boss of Lisp. McCarthy cracked back, “if Lisp has any boss, it’s you! You wrote the language manual!” The audience laughed. “There was no boss,” McCarthy said. “I never attempted to be the boss.” (And of course, as we had seen in the historical perspectives on Lisp earlier in the day, there were tons of Lisp implementations in the sixties and seventies. Each “tribe” was going off in their own directions and people couldn’t really consolidate them at the time because of hardware limitations.) “Even in the early days I wasn’t the boss of Lisp,” he said. “People could get things into Lisp without me knowing it.”

Steele asked what’s his one idea that could have had the most practical impact if it had actually gotten implemented. McCarthy said, if IBM had taken his ideas about time sharing… then things would have been quite a bit better in the 1960’s. At this point, JonL stood up and started clapping.

The final parts of the interview covered Perlis’s attachment to Formula-Algol before “apologizing” and agreeing with the Lisp approach. McCarthy said he had looked at Formula-Algol when they first proposed it and thought it was pretty bad: it overloaded the algebraic operations and applied them to formulas, he said. He concluded by saying he didn’t know what the alternatives were to abstract syntax. The most important problem we can be working on, he said, was formalizing common sense.

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