How McCarthy constructed the future in the 1960's

 In the previous entry, the podcast Software Engineering Radio stated that Lisp ended the same way it started, with the community. Nonetheless, this program, in my personal opinion, marked this language as one whose repercussions never really skyrocketed in the intended way. In contrast to that affirmation, the article The roots of Lisp not only the principles behind the creation of Lisp were mentioned, but really presented to the reader the impact that this programmable approach could change and did impact computer science as a whole. 

Throughout its numerous pages, the article by Graham, P provides a simple, yet technical enough to challenge the experienced programmer, explanation of the mathematical and syntactical principles behind Lisp. In a matter of minutes, the reader is introduced to Lisp's core functionality. The quick lesson started by reviewing important concepts such as atoms and operators as an introduction to the list power, and ended testing the ultimate capabilities of these basic notions to the point where the author presented a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp using the 7 primitive Lisp's operators.   

Although this engineering perspective was interesting, for me, the most important aspect of Graham's work was the dedication he put in explaining not only the reasons of why certain elements worked as they do, but also clarifying the historical intention of those decisions. Before the publication of McCarthy's work, there wasn't an understandable and efficient way to describe algorithms than those provided by the syntax of Turing Machine Programs (just as a clarification, what I refer as syntax in the Turing Machine context is the graphical or the fundamental mathematical description of programming). Thus, as it was hinted in the text, McCarthy's intentions with Lisp were not to create the AI Language, but to facilitate and expand programming to wider audiences with axiomatized processes. 

As a conclusion,  I just can say that, although McCarthy's work was made in 1960 and, a it is stated in the lecture, it lacked from key features for the modern tech industry, it proved to the world that, despite any preference in programming approaches, if a tool is powerful enough to make these tasks easier to read and quicker to understand as well as to develop, it will be the tool that will benefit the future.