John McCarthy (1927-2011) was an American computer scientist whose ideas shaped both programming languages and the field of artificial intelligence. On his own Stanford homepage he describes himself as Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, and lists among his work the paper he calls “the original paper on LISP.”
McCarthy designed LISP in the late 1950s, a language built around symbolic expressions and recursive functions. He set out the mathematical foundations in his 1960 paper “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I,” published in the Communications of the ACM. That paper introduced the core ideas that still define the LISP family of languages.
He is also credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence.” His own pages point to early work such as “Programs with Common Sense,” which he describes as probably the first paper on logical AI and possibly the first to propose common-sense reasoning as the key to AI.
In his “History of LISP,” McCarthy recounts the design decisions of the LISP project, including the choice of garbage collection as the strategy for reclaiming unused memory. That decision, made during LISP’s development, made automatic memory management a practical part of a working programming system for the first time.