In these past two months, we’ve seen the passing of two great names of our age; Professor Dennis Ritchie, father of C programming language; and Professor John McCarthy, father of Lisp and Artificial Intelligence.
Great people are not just geniuses, but they also include the spirit of exploration and ingenuity that makes a person achieve great things that the likes of Steven Jobs will never achieve, this life or next.
Professor Dennis Ritchie invented the C language, a programming language that basically revolutionize programming languages and provided a good standard programming language for various computing machines when programming back in 70s is still, in general, a mess. This creation later became the key to the existence of the UNIX System which leads to the creation of various operating systems that later evolved into modern operating systems such as Mac and Windows. Although the language has been modified and patched across the decades since its creation to keep up with modern technologies, it remains the most widely used programming language today. One can boldly state that without C, most modern computing systems would have appeared much later.
Professor John McCarthy, is the person who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” where so many of us casually spoken of, and whose passion in Artificial Intelligence leads him to create the Lisp programming langue which the industry eagerly adapted. The programming language later became the programming language of choice in the application of AI due to its close relation to mathematical operation. As the second oldest programming language in existence, many ideas were pioneered with Lisp such as tree data structures and dynamic typing. The professor’s various contributions in the field of Artificial Intelligence via new ideas and intuition helped the growth of the field. Without his contribution, and many other great names in AI and related fields, Siri will never have existed, Asimo will never have been created, and we could’ve never heard of the term “smart” so casually employed in every system that even barely involves AI programming.
It is sad the media pays more attention to the likes of the pirates of the Silicon Valley than inventors and creators such as these two great people whose life’s work brought countless benefits to various fields such as medicine and economics.
