Kenny, McCarthy, Lisp, and the Future

Kenny Tilton has a cool bit on his blog about why Lisp is so cool: smuglispweeny: Ooh! Ooh! My turn! Why Lisp? Personally, I liked the story at the end:

At ILC 2002 former Lisp giant now Python advocate Peter Norvig was for some reason allowed to give the keynote address like Martin Luther leading Easter Sunday mass at the Vatican and pitching Protestantism because in his talk Peter bravely repeated his claim that Python is a Lisp.

When he finished Peter took questions and to my surprise called first on the rumpled old guy who had wandered in just before the talk began and eased himself into a chair just across the aisle from me and a few rows up.

This guy had wild white hair and a scraggly white beard and looked hopelessly lost as if he had gotten separated from the tour group and wandered in mostly to rest his feet and just a little to see what we were all up to. My first thought was that he would be terribly disappointed by our bizarre topic and my second thought was that he would be about the right age, Stanford is just down the road, I think he is still at Stanford -- could it be?

"Yes, John?" Peter said.

I won't pretend to remember Lisp inventor John McCarthy's exact words which is odd because there were only about ten but he simply asked if Python could gracefully manipulate Python code as data.

"No, John, it can't," said Peter and nothing more, graciously assenting to the professor's critique, and McCarthy said no more though Peter waited a moment to see if he would and in the silence a thousand words were said.

John McCarthy is a really smart man. Personally, I'm also a big fan of his web pages on the sustainability of human progress. Every time some enviro-weenie talks about "sustainability" I want to smack them. Back to Kenny for a moment, at the last Lisp NYC meeting, Kenny was complaining (mentioned, perhaps, lest anyone think Kenny is a whiner) about his shoulder, that he hurt playing Tennis. The enviro-weenie would leap in, say "Tennis is unsustainable, you need to stop playing". Kenny wisely just corrected his form, stopped doing stupid things, and the pain got better. He said something to the effect of "Pain moves you towards correct form". Environmental troubles may suggest better ways of doing things, but there's rarely a need to stop.