The musical "Hamilton" has taken the world by storm, bringing the story of one of America's Founding Fathers to life in a way that has never been seen before. One of the most memorable characters in the show is Aaron Burr, the man who famously shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. But did you know that Burr also has a connection to the world of computer programming?
The Birth of Lisp
In the late 1950s, John McCarthy was a young computer scientist working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was part of a team that was working on developing a new programming language that would be more powerful and flexible than any that had come before. The language they came up with was called Lisp, short for "List Processing."
Lisp was revolutionary because it was the first programming language to use a technique called "garbage collection," which allowed programs to automatically manage their own memory usage. This made Lisp programs much easier to write and much more reliable than programs written in other languages.
The Aaron Burr Connection
So where does Aaron Burr come in? In the early 1960s, McCarthy was working on improving Lisp's capabilities even further. One of the new features he wanted to add was the ability to manipulate "lists" of data in more complex ways. To do this, he needed a new symbol that would represent a "list" of lists.
McCarthy decided to use the symbol "cons," short for "construct," to represent these lists. But he didn't come up with the name "cons" on his own. Instead, he was inspired by a quote from Aaron Burr.
The Famous Quote
In 1804, just before he shot Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr wrote a letter to his daughter in which he used the phrase "I should consign the remnant of my wearisome days to an embittered solitude." McCarthy was struck by the word "consign," which means "to deliver or commit to a person or place." He saw a connection between the idea of delivering something to a specific place and the idea of constructing a list in Lisp.
So McCarthy decided to use the symbol "cons" to represent the act of constructing a list. This symbol has become a fundamental part of Lisp and is still used today.
The Legacy of Lisp
Lisp has had a huge impact on the world of computer programming. Its innovative features have influenced many programming languages that have come after it, including Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. Lisp is also still used today in many specialized areas, such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
So the next time you hear the name Aaron Burr, remember that he played a small but important role in the creation of one of the most important programming languages in history.
Conclusion
The story of Aaron Burr and Lisp is just one example of how history and technology can intersect in unexpected ways. By understanding the origins of programming languages like Lisp, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the incredible creativity and innovation that has gone into the development of the technology we use every day.