How security holes happen

[Mark H. Harris]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 9:47:40 AM UTC-6, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> Seriously, Lisp is not only one of the oldest high-level languages 
> around, being almost as old as Fortran and Cobol, but it was one of the  
> biggest languages of the 1970s and even into the 80s. 

Lisp was specified by John McCarthy (of Berkeley, CA) in 1958.  It is the second
oldest computer language behind Fortran, by one year.

There is a resurgence of interest in Lisp today (yes, not so much for common lisp) 
in the Scheme arena. The irony for AI today is that we are finally at the point 
where the technology can finally do what Alonzo Church and Alan Turing dreamed 
about. John McCarthy was *way* ahead of his time too. We are at the point where 
we are wondering again if computer science & technology in software engineering
will ever generate a "thinking" entity---self aware, creative, and of course able to
generate on it's own, "Cogito ergo sum"> 

Lisp/Scheme is awesome. But, if I want to have my little 'ol puter do some real work,
up comes IDLE and out comes a script in a couple of hours that's "awesome"!  
I still play around with gnu emacs and lisp. Its fun, educational, and truly enriching
beyond words. Check out the site, "Lambda the Ultimate" sometime:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

marcus