From: Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au>
To: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2018 23:11:51 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <e4830fc5-21bd-234d-b945-faf6f64422d9@telegraphics.com.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKzdPgwMSP_DM1OXP9kACUP3mCZVWEjEXofdDsbZwGqWXCQ_HQ@mail.gmail.com>
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@telegraphics.com.au
> <mailto:toby@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
> >
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-12-03 4:14 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-12-02 22:17 Dave Horsfall
2018-12-02 22:34 ` Toby Thain
2018-12-03 1:32 ` Rob Pike
2018-12-03 4:11 ` Toby Thain [this message]
2018-12-03 4:27 ` Rob Pike
2018-12-03 13:10 ` John P. Linderman
2018-12-03 22:44 ` ron
2018-12-03 16:25 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-03 20:20 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-03 20:37 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-03 20:46 ` Hellwig Geisse
2018-12-03 22:24 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-03 23:00 ` Lawrence Stewart
2018-12-04 11:53 ` Tony Finch
2018-12-04 14:23 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 14:43 Noel Chiappa
2018-12-04 14:53 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 16:24 ` Tim Rylance
2018-12-04 16:53 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 17:46 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-04 20:59 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-05 17:49 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-04 15:18 ` Toby Thain
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