[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

[Toby Thain]

On 2018-12-02 8:32 PM, Rob Pike wrote:
> Fortran was a marvel. Don't judge it by today's ideas about language design.

The 1977 lecture was by John Backus, not me, so I'm confused who that's
directed at.

> 
> -rob
> 
> 
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 9:34 AM Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au
> <mailto:toby at telegraphics.com.au>> wrote:
> 
>     On 2018-12-02 5:17 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>     > As every computer programmer should know, John Backus was emitted in
>     > 1924; he gave us the BNF syntax (he is the "B"), but he also gave us
>     > that FORTRAN obscenity...  Yeah, it was a nice language at the
>     time; the
>     > engineers loved it, but tthe computer scientists hated it (have
>     you ever
>     > tried to debug a FORTRAN program that somebody else wrote?).
> 
>     He made amends by being early to recognise that problem, and propose
>     solutions, in his 1977 ACM Turing Award lecture (still perfectly
>     relevant today):
> 
>     https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf
> 
>     --Toby
> 
> 
> 
>     >
>     > Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any
>     syntax; it
>     > is completely ad-hoc.
>     >
>     > -- Dave
>     >
>