My mum used to say that bad news and good news travel around in groups of three...We had Steve Jobs. Then Denis Ritchie, and now, apparently, John McCarthy.
Lisp was one of the great inventions in all of computer science. Its influence on all programming languages - including those that chose to make themselves not-lisp-like, has been immense. If ever a programming language embodied a paradigm - a way of looking at the world - .... that is Lisp.
Emacs, AutoCad, Softquad SGML Author/Editor, Interleaf...
Then of course there was SICP...