My first taste of writing code was Fortran or BASIC, can’t remember which led, but I’d seen both before graduating high school. Either way I can’t say I’d really done any programming.
I got a brutal, 6 week introduction to C (not Mark Randolph’s fault, just a tough intro language (inadvertent DMR reference)) in a summer prep program before matriculating at MIT. Still, not really a programmer.
Then I had the great fortune of having 6.001 with Jerry Sussman. The whole course was taught in Scheme, a highly elegant, beautifully designed, descendant of John McCarthy’s original Lisp. For whatever the reason, I took to the language like a fish and I’ve been programming, sometimes in dribs and drabs, ever since. I got Lisp well enough to do a UROP under Steve Ward, hacking on Lisp machines. My One True Editor, Emacs, is inseparable from Lisp. The key concept of my dissertation was stuffing Lisp, as an extension language, in various platforms like a Web browser.
Paul Graham has one of the better descriptions of the essence of Lisp, but it’s safe to say that John McCarthy had a pretty profound, indirect influence on my life. Sad to see the end of McCarthy’s life arrive.
Oh and Lisp was just a sidebar for all of the AI work he really wanted to do.
Godspeed, kind sir.