Not a good month for computer pioneers

[Andrew Haley]

On 10/27/2011 11:52 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> I personally care most about James Gosling, Linus Torvalds, and Mike
> Cowlishaw, father of Rexx and NetRexx. Inventors of other languages /
> software that I don´t use, are irrelevant. ;-)

Well, McCarthy was one of the designers of ALGOL, and in particular he
first proposed recursion for the language.  It's possible that few
(except perhaps McCarthy himself) knew how important this would be.

ALGOL 60 -> CPL -> BCPL -> B -> C

So there!  :-)

Andrew.


McCarthy, J. (1959) On Conditional Expressions and Recursive Functions
(Letter). CACM, 2:8, 2-3.  cited in proc. HOPL I.