Eek, for 5 points, I feel like I should add something other than an unrelated complaint. Since I missed the edit window, I think this was the most interesting answer in the bunch, in relation to "what should be added to languages":
I have one advocacy, [...] something to be explicitly added to Lisp and to other programming languages: a language should have access to its own abstract syntax. Abstract syntax is an idea I proposed in a paper in 1962. It's too elaborate to talk about much now, but the general idea of it is that, as far as the abstract syntax in concerned, it's indifferent whether sums are represented by a+b or (+ a b), as Lisp would do it, or as Gödel numbers would do it as 17 to the Gödel number of a x 19 to the Gödel number of b. You still need functions for distinguishing whether an expression is a sum and for getting the summands and the syntactic function for taking 2 expressions and forming the sum expression. That's abstract syntax and I believe that a programming language should have built into it its own abstract syntactic functions.
Chrome users are highly advised to pick up the Readability Redux extension. It has been consistently faster for me than the bookmarklet - reformatted results are effectively instant now.
That read a lot like the recent Bill Watterson interview.
Fans: Blah blah blah invention of lisp 50 years ago?
McCarthy: I don't know, I can't remember that far back in that much detail and it doesn't matter now anyway; can't you move on and ask me something about my recent work and stop objectifying me as some kind of ancient artifact?
Fans: Thanks for the interview, we all appreciate you inventing Lisp!
McCarthy: {smiles through tensed jaw muscles and compressed lips}
* Implied content, they didn't actually say these things.
I thought this was great. Newell & Simon are sort of heroes of mine, and I enjoyed hearing McCarthy's view of the relation of Lisp to IPL & Fortran (from Backus). Are there any good biographies of these people? (I know that Simon wrote an autobiography, but I haven't read it.)
The summary of the big ideas/innovations from Lisp was pretty awesome -- programs as data, first-class functions, an expression-oriented language, eval as a Turing-complete function, garbage collection, linked lists, etc.
Guy Steele mentions he is standing in for Alan Kay. I wish whoever arranged that would put together a panel discussion with Alan Kay and Guy Steele talking about programming languages... or pretty much anything...
