Re: [stack] Backus's Turing Award Lecture and Joy.

it's been a while since i've read backus' turing award
lecture, but if i'm not mistaken he credits ken iverson's
work on APL.  ken's own turing lecture may return the
compliment, but again, i'm not sure.  in any event, there
was a certain degree of mutual feedback APL -> FP -> J, 
especially with respect to the latter's "tacit form",
i.e. variable-free J.  people close to ken might be able
to document the interaction in more detail, but as i 
recall, the general take on FP in the APL community was
that "APL did it better" (what else would you expect?)

i think it's interesting that programmers consider FP
backus' most significant achievement, while obituarists
have invariably singled out his authorship of Fortran.
even john derbyshire, who really ought to know better,
memorializes him this way:
In That Dawn   [John Derbyshire]


John Backus, who invented the FORTRAN language, has died at age 82. 

This news will be of interest to old mainframe-heads, and to nobody else at all.

I must say, I never warmed to FORTRAN.  It had a sort of angular clunkiness about it that was apparent even in the 1960s.  That FORMAT statement-hoo-ee!  

The inherent inefficiency of any high-level language in any case grated on my pure-math sensibilities.  I was an Assembler guy at heart, "coding down to the metal."  

Nobody does that any more, and computers are just boring now, like cars.  I increasingly find I have to drag myself to the keyboard nowadays.  Boy, was it exciting at the time, though!

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
  But to be young was very heaven!

etc., etc.


03/23 10:42 AM

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODQ5MDQ1NTM2NTY2NjkwMjE0MTk0ZWFiZjcwMzZjNTg=



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: [email protected] 
  To: [email protected] 
  Sent: Friday, March 23, 2007 3:00 PM
  Subject: Re: [stack] Backus's Turing Award Lecture and Joy.


  Perhaps (just a speculation) part of the reason that concatenative
  languages are a hard sell among academic computer scientists
  is the very fact that this famous 30-year old paper advocated a 
  point-free style. Backus was by any measure a giant in the field --
  you could not ask for a better spokesman -- so the idea certainly
  was given due consideration. It may be that people feel that the
  idea (point-free programming, that is) was tried out and failed.

  I think that Christopher is wise to present his language as a typed
  intermediate language that can be targeted by "higher-level"
  languages. That's a niche where Cat might obtain a foothold.
  There is some serious competition, however. The Java virtual
  machine and .Net come to mind.

  Another niche that I have been interested in for years is embedded
  programming, particularly on the really small chips, such as the 
  Motorola HC08 8-bit chips and the Texas Instruments MSP430 16-
  bit chips. http://focus.ti.com/mcu/docs/mcuhome.tsp?sectionId=101
  The state of programming on these chips is amazingly crude: 
  usually a subset of C with some hacky ad-hoc extensions, or even 
  assembly. The chip manufacturers understand this, but their 
  attempts at solutions invariably fall flat because they try to jump all 
  the way to a completely visual programming paradigm. There's 
  only so much you can do by dragging around icons and drawing 
  lines between them.

  Forth, Inc and one or two other companies are ekeing out a living
  by offering Forth systems for programming these chips. Forth, IMHO,
  is a step above the run-of-the-mill C solutions because it has such
  a tight loop between writing code and testing it. It's the same 
  advantage that Lisp and Scheme systems have for programming
  larger-scale systems -- the read-eval-print loop (REPL) gives nearly
  instant feedback. Forth and Lisp share another characteristic, a
  nearly complete lack of syntax, that unfortunately seems to put off
  many programmers.

  So I wonder... If a statically typed, well thought out language like
  Cat was implemented for one of these tiny processors, and was
  supplied with the same REPL-like environment as Forth, could it
  find another niche there?

  -Rod

  "Christopher Diggins" <[email protected]> 
  Sent by: [email protected]
  03/22/2007 11:57 PM
  Please respond to
  [email protected]

  To
  [email protected]
  cc

  Subject
  Re: [stack] Backus's Turing Award Lecture and Joy.

  > On 3/22/07, John Carter <[email protected]> wrote:
  > > With the recent death of John Backus, his Turing Award paper has
  > > reemerged into the light...
  > >
  > > http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf
  > >
  > > It is remarkably relevant in terms of discussing why Joy (and related
  > > languages) are such a Good Idea.
  > >
  >
  > Which parts are relevant to Joy? As I scan the paper, particularly
  > the section-by-section summary at the end, I see some criticism of the
  > prevalent style of programming. That seems relevant. But it looks
  > like this 30 year old paper was advocating applicative state
  > transition (AST) systems. Is there a connection between AST and Joy?
  >
  > --Joe

  Here is a snippet which I think is relevant:

  "In this section we give an informal description of a
  class of simple applicative programming systems called
  functional programming (FP) systems, in which "programs"
  are simply functions without variables. The description
  is followed by some examples and by a discussion
  of various properties of FP systems.
  An FP system is founded on the use of a fixed set of
  combining forms called functional forms. These, plus
  simple definitions, are the only means of building new
  functions from existing ones; they use no variables or
  substitution rules, and they become the operations of an
  associated algebra of programs. All the functions of an
  FP system are of one type: they map objects into objects
  and always take a single argument.
  In contrast, a lambda-calculus based system is
  founded on the use of the lambda expression, with an
  associated set of substitution rules for variables, for
  building new functions. The lambda expression (with its
  substitution rules) is capable of defining all possible
  computable functions of all possible types and of any
  number of arguments. This freedom and power has its ... "

  Clearly Backus felt that there was elegance to a point-free language.

  I would still like to hear John's response though, because he may have
  some useful insights to share on the paper. I have a hard time
  convincing others of the value concatenative style languages and I'd
  like to know how to better leverage this paper.

  Christopher Diggins
  http://www.cdiggins.com


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