Eliot,

On Oct 27, 2011, at 2:15 PM, Eliot Lear wrote:

> Bob,
> 
> First, I share your admiration for John McCarthy (after all, who does
> not?).  In that spirit, my understanding was that LISP was an homage,
> and as such should not be viewed in a negative light.  You're of course
> right that we do stand on shoulders– many.

I reviewed some of the early drafts and the closest thing I could find to an 
acknowledgment related to the chosen name was in <draft-farinacci-lisp-00.txt>:

   In particular, we would like to thank Dave Meyer for his clever
   suggestion for the name "LISP". ;-)

Bob



> 
> Eliot
> On 10/27/11 11:08 PM, Bob Hinden wrote:
>> John McCarthy died a few days ago.  I won't try to summarize his 
>> accomplishments myself but thought that the obituary in the NY Times was 
>> very good:
>> 
>>  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html
>> 
>> "John McCarthy, a computer scientist who helped design the foundation of 
>> today’s Internet-based computing and who is widely credited with coining the 
>> term for a frontier of research he helped pioneer, Artificial Intelligence, 
>> or A.I., died on Monday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 84.
>> ....
>> In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
>> where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence 
>> Laboratory.  It was at M.I.T. that he began working on what he called List 
>> Processing Language, or Lisp, a computer language that became the standard 
>> tool for artificial intelligence research and design."
>> 
>> With his death, I have a request.
>> 
>> I request that the relevant authors and IETF working group rename what it 
>> currently calls "LISP" to something else.  To put it politely, the IETF 
>> should be standing on the shoulders of the giants who have laid the 
>> groundwork of the Internet, not stepping on their toes. 
>> 
>> Bob
>> 
>> 
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