[Discuss] "Fortran father John Backus, dead at 82"

[Adam Parkin]

Lloyd Budd wrote:
> Seems relevant with the recent Fortran discussions:
> 
> "Backus helped define the "hacker ethic". Leading a small team to do
> great things quickly, and leverage their own mistakes in order to
> learn, Backus shattered the paradigm of 1950s corporate IBM and,
> developed a language that is only now beginning to fade into history."
> 
> Backus is quoted as saying, "You need the willingness to fail all the
> time." "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very
> hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that
> over and over until you find one that does work."
> 
> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/03/20/fortran-father-john-backus-dead-at-82/ 

Wow, I hadn't heard that he had passed away.  One of the great computer 
scientists (IMHO).

Another link to a Washington Post article on him:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/20/AR2007032001576.html

Classic quote:

"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Mr. Backus told Think, the 
IBM employee magazine, in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, 
when I was working on the [early computer] IBM 701, writing programs for 
computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system 
to make it easier to write programs."
-- 
--
Adam Parkin
E-mail: pzelnip at gmail.com
Blog: http://www.gamertagblog.com/blog/333
----------------------
  Everyone is entitled to my opinion.