"For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesity; as a result, the study and invention of programming languages has lost much of its excitement. Instead, it is now the province of those who prefer to work with thick compendia of details rather than wrestle with new ideas. Discussions about programming languages often resemble medieval debates about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin instead of exciting contests between fundamentally differing concepts. Many creative computer scientists have retreated from inventing languages to inventing tools for describing them. Unfortunately, they have been largely content to apply their elegant new tools to studying the warts and moles of existing languages."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesDesignersPeople from PhiladelphiaComputer scientists from the United StatesMathematicians from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Backus
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist and winner of the 1977 Turing Award. He led the team that invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also helped to popularize function-level programming.
5 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Backus →
Related Quotes
"Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantic…"
"Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (…"
"Well, that's a subject interested me a lot because I've seen so many young people in our culture today, that emphasiz…"
"You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard on…"
"For him delicious flavors dwell In books as in old Muscatel."
"And in the evening, everywhere Along the roadside, up and down, I see the golden torches flare Like lighted street-la…"
"Song like a rose should be; Each rhyme a petal sweet; For fragrance, melody, That when her lips repeat The words, her…"
"The hunter catches a dreadful prey, the seaman steers his ship into an unspeakable harbor, the plowman sows and reaps…"
"You are the king no doubt, but in one respect, at least, I am your equal: the right to reply. I claim that privilege …"
"When Hector heard that challenge he rejoiced and right in the no man's land along his lines he strode, gripping his s…"