Lisp—the language invented in the late 1950s by John McCarthy that, decades later, still inspired many of OSAF’s programmers—is one great recursion machine. Alan Kay likes to point to McCarthy’s “half-page of code at the bottom of Chapter 1 of the Lisp 1.5 manual” and praise it as the “Maxwell’s equations of computing”—concentrated, elegant statements that distilled the field’s fundamental principles just as James Clerk Maxwell’s four equations had laid out the essential workings of electricity and magnetism at the dawn of the machine age. On the page that Kay cited, which provides definitions
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