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Development

Featured in Development

Expanding Swift from Apps to Services

Cory Benfield discusses the evolution of Swift from an app language to a critical tool for secure, high-scale services. He explains how Swift’s lack of a garbage collector eliminates tail latency and shares how its "zero-cost abstractions" rival C performance. He shares Apple’s roadmap for incremental adoption and demonstrates groundbreaking new interoperability for C++ and Java ecosystems.

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

[Video Podcast] Improving Valkey with Madelyn Olson

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Madelyn Olson, a maintainer of the Valkey project and a Principal Software Development Engineer at Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB. The conversation covers how Valkey started as an open source fork of Redis and how the maintainers optimized the memory usage and improved throughput.

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Building LLMs in Resource-Constrained Environments: A Hands-On Perspective

In this article, the author argues that infrastructure and compute limitations can drive innovation. It demonstrates how smaller, efficient models, synthetic data generation, and disciplined engineering enable the creation of impactful LLM-based AI systems despite severe resource constraints.

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Scaling to 100+ as a Director: Lessons from Growing Engineering Organizations

Thiago Ghisi discusses the strategic evolution required to lead 100+ engineers without breaking the organization. He explains his "Three Levels of Impact" framework and shares practical lessons on speeding up decision-making, cultivating leadership teams, and building organizational resilience. Learn why he views reorgs as a continuous deployment feature rather than a one-time traumatic event.

All in culture-methods

DevOps

Featured in DevOps

From Alert Fatigue to Agent-Assisted Intelligent Observability

As systems grow, observability becomes harder to maintain and incidents harder to diagnose. Agentic observability layers AI on existing tools, starting in read-only mode to detect anomalies and summarize issues. Over time, agents add context, correlate signals, and automate low-risk tasks. This approach frees engineers to focus on analysis and judgment.

All in devops

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InfoQ Homepage Interviews Guy Steele Interviews John McCarthy, Father of Lisp

Guy Steele Interviews John McCarthy, Father of Lisp

56:06

Bio

John McCarthy has been involved in Artificial Intelligence since 1948, a term he coined in 1955. He has been mainly interested in formalization of common sense knowledge. He designed LISP in 1958 and developed the concept of time-sharing. Among others, he has received the Turing Award, the Research Excellence Award, and the Kyoto Prize.

About the conference

Starting in 1986, OOPSLA Conference has proven to be the cradle of many techniques and methodologies that have become mainstream over the years: OOP, Patterns, AOP, XP, Unit Testing, UML, Wiki, and Refactoring. Gaining its prestige with 3 academic tracks, OOPSLA Conference has managed to attract researchers, educators and developers every year. The event is sponsored by ACM.

May 01, 2009

Interview with

John McCarthy

by

Guy Steele

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