John Backus

Sometimes it seems like we’re quick to forget the great engineers and scientists who make our world possible. More people know who Anna Nicole Smith is than say Jon Postel. I’ve been really pleased to see all ink spilled on the passing of John Backus. While I knew about Fortran and BNF I didn’t realize how bright and forward thinking the guy behind them was.

Conventional programming languages are growing ever more enormous, but not stronger. Inherent defects at the most basic level cause them to be both fat and weak…[via Scott Rosenberg]

That is from the opening of an ACM paper he wrote advocating for functional programming instead of conventional procedural programming. Functional programming took a back seat to Object Oriented programming, but in recent years it has seen a resurgence. I imagine part of this is because we’ve also seen a sort of return to the mainframe/dumb terminal model of computing with web servers/browsers. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have Google championing functional programming with their map/reduce algorithms.

It’s great to see someone willing to look beyond their own innovations (Fortran isn’t functional) to find a better way. I hope I can see my own flaws as clearly.