[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

[Rob Pike]

To the author of the first message, the one who called Fortran an
"obscenity".

-rob


On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 3:11 PM Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:

> 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
> >     >
> >
>
>
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