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by khafra 6293 days ago
He explains in the comments that he meant it predictively, in that their work would survive long beyond them. I don't think programming has been around on a large scale long enough for dead masters who've actually died, unless you'd consider Turing, Church, and Shannon to be programmers. Hell, even the inventor/discoverer of Lisp is still around.

edit: I added "Discovered" because that's the way many Lisp fans, including pg, refer to it.
2 comments
endtime 6293 days ago
Discoverer? I mean, I think Lisp is great, but I wouldn't call it a fundamental part of the universe.
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Hexstream 6293 days ago
You obviously haven't read about apply/eval. SICP is a great book. It's even available online! There's also the lectures.

SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ The part about apply/eval: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-26.html...

The lectures: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma... (apply/eval is discussed in Lecture 7, the meta-circular evaluator. I'm not sure if you could understand it without watching the previous lectures, however they're all wonderful)

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Hexstream 6293 days ago
He should probably have called that section "Immortal programmers".
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