John McCarthy, a computer scientist and creator of the Lisp programming language, died Sunday at the age of 84, according to The Register. McCarthy was a pioneer in artificial intelligence and even coined the term. He created Lisp in 1958 as a tool for furthering AI work, though the language has found broader use since its inception.

Although it was never as ubiquitous or well known as C, Lisp went on to become one of the most influential languages in programming. This summer Ruby creator Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto told me in an interview that Lisp is his favorite language besides Ruby: “It’s the ancestor for every good language,” Matz said.

In addition to Ruby, Lisp was a key influence on languages like Python, Lua, Scala, Haskell and Smalltalk (which became a big influence on Java and Objective-C). Perhaps its biggest influence today is the impact it had on JavaScript. According to JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, JavaScript was originally proposed as “Scheme in the browser” (Scheme is a dialect of Lisp). Although many more influences went into JavaScript other than Lisp/Scheme, JavaScript, the Good Parts author Douglas Crockford has famously described JavaScript as “Lisp in C’s clothing.”

Apart from languages that are influenced by Lisp, its dialects are still in use today. Clojure is a Lisp dialect that runs on the Java Virtual Machine and has increasingly popular in recent years.

The deaths of technology giants like Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie and McCarthy remind us in this hyper-networked, post-PC era just how much we owe to the visionaries and hackers that came before.

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