John Backus

My favorite computer science paper is Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs by John Backus. It struck me because it reflected my own thoughts on contemporary languages. I started to compile quotations from the paper, but found I was quoting more than not, so instead I’ll just give you a taste by quoting the very beginning. If this piques your interest, I highly recommend reading the paper; it’s very readable, insightful, and prophetic. As I design languages, this will be one of my influences. I wish I had been able to meet him before he passed away.

Programming languages appear to be in trouble. Each successive language incorporates, with a little cleaning up, all the features of its predecessors plus a few more. Some languages have manuals exceeding 500 pages; others cram a complex description into shorter manuals by using dense formalisms. The Department of Defense has current plans for a committee-designed language standard that could require a manual as long as 1,000 pages. Each new language claims new and fashionable features, such as strong typing or structured control statements, but the plain fact is that few languages make programming sufficiently cheaper or more reliable to justify the cost of producing and learning to use them.