John Kemeny

The BASIC programming language gets much grief from the hacker elite who dream in C++, Java, C#, and other object-oriented monster languages. The truth is that many of the computer professionals of today cut their teeth on some version of BASIC. Indeed, Microsoft's Visual Basic is arguably the most successful language in the world for hobbyists as well as numerous Windows consultants.

BASIC was born on May 1, 1964, at Dartmouth College. The brain child of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, two math professors. Tom is still alive, but John Kemeny died back in '92. Both names were, perhaps, mentioned in my old high school data processing class (circa 1983), but "mentioned" is as far as it went.

John Kemeny was a Hungarian immigrant to the US. He worked for Richard Feynman during the development of the bomb at Los Alamos (this was before Kemeny had even finished his undergrad degree). While in graduate school at Princeton, he was the mathematics research assistant to Albert Einstein. After co-creating BASIC, he went on to become a President of Dartmouth (but insisted on being allowed to teach a couple of classes each semester). Kemeny was the leader of the commission that investigated The Three Mile Island accident. He died on December 26, 1992, at the age 66 of unexpected heart failure.

Why share an outline sketch of a life that passed so many years ago? I think because I stumbled across the following when doing some research on the history of programming languages, and it made me want to remember. After John Kemeny's death, this was written in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine: "The newspaper said John G. Kemeny, 13th president of Dartmouth College, died of heart failure. Clearly this was a mistake. John Kemeny's heart never failed anyone."

Further research confirmed that this man, who is mostly known for a maligned product, but whose intellectual biography is as impressive as any in the 20th century, was remembered by those who knew him as someone who's "heart never failed anyone." That line haunts me, maybe because I know that when my life is over it will not be true of me. But perhaps, like Scrooge, there is still time to redeem the life that remains.

Postscript - What did Kemeny think of himself? When he handed over the office of president of Dartmouth to his successor he made this comment: "History alone will be able to judge whether my presidency was good or what my record is worth, but there is one thing I do know for certain: I'm one hell of a good teacher."