John Warner Backus

[Pragma]

Tomas Lindquist Olsen wrote:
> Pragma wrote:
> 
>> FWIW, he had one heck of a sendoff over on slashdot and digg:
>>
>> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/20/0223234
>> http://www.digg.com/programming/John_W_Backus_82_Fortran_Developer_Dies
>>
> 
> Reading the slashdot freakshow this PDF got me thinking a bit about where we
> (and D) are going...
> 
> http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf

Thanks for the link.  It's an interesting read.  Sweeny says some really *odd* things about the stauts quo, that make me 
wonder WTF the programmers on his team are doing.  His comments on concurrency and musings on the next language are dead 
on, with (appropriate) shades of Backus thrown in:

"In an concurrent world, imperative is the wrong default."
"Transactions are the only plausible solution to concurrent mutable statue."

D shines in a few of these areas, but needs library support for transactional memory, better concurrency support and 
constructs, something like a well-coded numerics library (true integers, etc), and something resembling compile-time 
iterator/bounds checking to fit the bill. :(

-- 
- EricAnderton at yahoo