http://my.opera.com/Vorlath/blog/2007/03/23/why-the-black-box-analogy-does-not-work-for-function

Yeah, my Internet access is in limbo. It’ll be back up next week tho. In the meantime, I may well have a vacation of sorts with the result of another project (real estate related), but I feel kind of stupid that I can’t raise the final 5K cuz I don’t know anyone. We have a plan B tho although less lucrative. If this works, vacation day will be every day. Anyways, after that I can finally show to the world what I’ve been talking about all this time by finishing my own software development tool. If anyone has articles on IC type software, let me know. There’s one particular one I’m looking for that said the only reason we didn’t use it was because the economic model for it would not sustain companies. Would programmers still want easy and reliably built software if it meant there was no money in it? What if that was the tradeoff?

My wife’s parents also live in Ashland, where John Backus last resided.

It turns out that Backus’ daughter is our family veterinarian in Ashland. My father-in-law knew Backus for a few years because of this. And yet I don’t believe he knew Backus was the inventor of Fortran.

I’m guessing that the old “six degrees of separation” could probably be five or even four when talking about the software community.

Patrick

Seriously, thanks — I’m going to read the critique carefully, but not till after I’ve read the whole Backus paper first… Meanwhile, hope your sporadic internet access means you’re getting a vacation of some kind and not that your experiencing a telecommunications breakdown!

http://my.opera.com/Vorlath/blog/2007/03/21/code-reads-backus-1977-turing-lecture

Ironically, since one of his lasting contributions to the field was a method for formalizing programming syntax, Backus did not have the knack for inventing clean, intuitive syntax. Fortran is notoriously tricky, as in this example from the dragon book:

In DO 5 I = 1.25, “DO 5 I” is an identifier that is assigned a floating-point value. In DO 5 I = 1,25, “DO” is a keyword introducing a loop.

It seems that his FP syntax is pretty bad too. He’s assigned cryptic symbols to “combinators” that could have (and had, even then, e.g., in Lisp) natural language descriptions. E.g. “alpha” is “map”, and “/” is “fold”