Learning Lisp/Scheme - Re: John McCarthy

Liam, A previous version of this text, which had a first part about AI (split into a separate book when this version came out), was the reason I didn't drop out of computer science during my first year at the university. I had been fascinated by computers since childhood and learned Basic and assembly language while in high school. At the university I met Fortran, Algol and learned Pascal on my own. These were all slight variations of the same thing - computers had become so boring that I considered moving on to electronic musical instruments. My father met an american who was visting Brazil and was reading Patrick's 1977 "Artificial Intelligence" (he wasn't even a computer guy, but had bought the book on a whim to have something to read on the plane). Since computer books were hard to find around here, my father offered to buy the book for twice what it cost so the guy could get another copy when he returned home. When he told me he had bought a book about "some programming language", I thought he had wasted his money because I saw no point in learning the details of yet another variation of Algol. The first part of the book (now http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-3rd-Winston/dp/0201533774) showed me a completely new side of computing (not boring!) and the second part (the book you have) showed how to implement the theory, and it didn't look anything like Algol. Once I saw that things could be different, I quickly learned APL, Forth, Smalltalk, Occam, FP, Prolog and so on. I am not sure that either part of the book by itself would have had the same impact on me, so I think it is a pity that it was split even if each half gained interesting new material. So thanks, Patrick Henry Winston, but most of all thanks John McCarthy!