https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaWVHyIBVeI
Transcript:
John McCarthy was a good programmer. I was a not very good programmer. And he had invented this wonderful language called LISP, which was based on the nice language that Newell and Simon had invented called... no... its called IPL. Information processing language. IPL is made of little atoms and its very tedious. And McCarthy's invention was... it was more like FORTRAN, which was... which is a language... IPL just had little instructions. FORTRAN has statements. Make this true. And LISP had statements with a very clean syntax. It only had... it basically has 5 basic verbs. Whereas FORTRAN is a big mess of arbitrary... has a big library. So, McCarthy's was a very elegant cleaning up of computer science. And thereafter there were two kinds of languages. The algebraic language FORTRAN and this recursive language based on Lisp, which they're now dying out because... of... In a Lisp program you can write a program that writes Lisp programs. So it has a kind of open future. Now no one actually does that yet, but its still possible. In the other languages its almost... you can't write a C program that will write a C program. Its just... there aren't any verbs of the right kind. So, to me programming hasn't changed much in 50 years because they got locked into this... strange set of limitations.