The article is called "the idea of Lisp" conveying the broad concepts. It's mean as something that can be digested as a newsletter or an email. He even mentions his email list in the article.
I don't think it was meant to be an encyclopedic reference on the language.
I think its odd that you spent that much effort tearing it apart. I for one enjoyed reading it while I was waiting for a coffee.
Who actually wrote the machine code is arcana that's lost to the dust bin of history anyway. What isn't lost are the high level ideas presented here.
I don't like that you're being downvoted. You're making a fair point. I do like the second half of the article, for the record.
I think that attribution matters; albeit probably more the attribution to Church and Turing than to Steve Russell over McCarthy. It matters because if someone finds the ideas the article brings up interesting and wants to dig into them, they should know where to turn. The history of ideas informs future ideas to come.
I also think understanding the details of high-level ideas matters. The misconceptions about self-interpretation, for example, are quite deep: no language can ultimately be defined in terms of itself, but always in terms of something lower-level. Chase this thread far enough and you start studying transistors; or, in another direction, Goedel's incompleteness theorems.
I don't think it was meant to be an encyclopedic reference on the language.
I think its odd that you spent that much effort tearing it apart. I for one enjoyed reading it while I was waiting for a coffee.
Who actually wrote the machine code is arcana that's lost to the dust bin of history anyway. What isn't lost are the high level ideas presented here.