John Warner Backus
Pragma
ericanderton at yahoo.removeme.com
Thu Mar 22 10:58:54 PDT 2007
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
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