alidcastano

Given your responses I wouldn't say its misworded but wrong. Specifically referring to his last sentence:

"McCarthy didn't realize it could be used on computers till his graduate student Steve Russell suggested it."

Anyway, appreciate the clarification/link. Will try to correct my article when I get a chance.

I first heard about Lisp from reading Paul Graham's articles, so naturally I learned about its history the same way.

In PG's essay introducing Bel, a new Lisp dialect, he mentions the origins of Lisp: "His goal was not to define a programming language in our sense of the word: a language used to tell computers what to do. The Lisp in his 1960 paper was meant to be a formal model of computation, like a Turing Machine. McCarthy didn't realize it could be used on computers till his graduate student Steve Russell suggested it."

Given how much research he's done on Lisp, I figured his interpretation of its history would be correct.

edit: sorry, forgot to include link: https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bellanguage.txt?t=157...

This is actually an area I'm working on.

As @ziddoap mentioned, the main drawback to digital note-taking and learning is that it is not as natural to engage with your notes (drawing, making comments, etc).

But there are other aspects of digital notes that make them superior to hand-written ones when it comes to learning. It's just that, imo, it hasn't been optimized for yet.

Specifically, take spaced-repetition. One of the most proven ways to improve memory. It'd be easy to integrate such a system inside a note-taking app - and that would help ensure note-takers self-test themselves and periodically review their notes. But no note-taking app is doing that, at least not built-in.

So that's why I've started working on this myself. The app is called Studbits (http://studbits.com), and the idea is simple: we let you create flashcards alongside your notes and then remind you to review them with a spaced-repetition system.