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Thanking John McCarthy for introducing Garbage Collection, LISP and AI to the world. May he rest in peace

It’s sad to hear that John McCarthy, the father of AI and LISP inventor passed away. I started my programming with COBOL and C, discovered LISP while working at Trilogy for Gensym product – a complex system with AI and NN components used to model real world expert systems used in defense, manufacuring industries & even space sations for mission critical monitoring and cause-effect analysis etc and fell in love with the launguage because  of it’s simplicity.

LISP was the first language to have conditional constructs, literals and whole code could be written as bunch of expressions – the beauty of symbols, lists and constructs was pure awesomeness. Before Trilogy acquired Gensym, they even had their own LISP compiler (later ported it to Common LISP) and built a translator to convert LISP code to C/C++ executable for deployment – Gensym also had a language called G2 KB which is used by application developers to model their business logic using bunch of symbols, functions and expressions exposed in simple English constructs and via GUI components.

I still remember how difficult (yeah thanks to few years work with J2EE and .NET stuff ) it was initially for me to understand those LISP literals with complex expressions with nested functions – sometimes used to wonder how come such a little piece of code could do so much (recursion was another core beauty). Going through Thousands of LOC of LISP in Gensym core engine and understand it to fix bugs was fun and yet challenging – initially I worked on tuning forward and backward propagation algorithms for cause-effect analysis of events/data points from real world componets/systems and it was my first real world use of Neural Networks. Once LISP become familiar it was so much fun to work, modify G2 core behavior and add features like messaging queues and escalation notifications through alarms.

Thank you John McCarthy for introducing Garbage Collection, LISP and AI to the world, we will miss you and RIP.