

Dijkstra's review of Backus's FP Turing Award speech - omouse
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD692.html

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omouse
Backus's paper covered functional programming. I'll dig it up if anyone's
interested (should be on ACM).

 _The first impression that his functional programming style invites
implementations with a lot of concurrency should be complemented by the remark
that it invites a lot of traffic that the von Neumann machine doesn't need._

 _He presents the proving of the correctness of programs as an activity
reserved for geniuses: "The complexity of this axiomatic game of proving facts
about von Neumann programs makes the successes of its practitioners all the
more admirable. Their success rests on two factors in addition to their
ingenuity"._

 _And then comes his fundamental complaint "In any case, proofs about programs
use the language of logic, not the language of programs. Proofs talk about
programs but cannot involve them directly [? EWD] since the axioms of von
Neumann languages are so unusable." and he presents as an advantage --without
questioning-- that in his system "Algebraic transformations and proofs use the
language of the programs themselves, rather than the language of logic, which
talks about programs." I am not quite sure what is meant by talking proofs and
talking logic. But whereas machines must be able to execute programs (without
understanding them), people must be able to understand them (without executing
them). These two activities are so utterly disconnected --the one can take
place without the other-- that I fail to see the claimed advantage of being so
"monolingual"._

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rincewind
Dijkstra was replying to this:

<http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf>

AFAIR Backus says that C and Pascal are too low-level to be good at problem
solving, but pure functional programs, point-free style and a more math-like
notation may make programming less error-prone.

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kssreeram
Here's an interesting quote from article:

"In short, [Backus's lecture] is a progress report on a valid research effort
but suffers badly from aggressive overselling of its significance, long before
convincing results have been reached. This is the more regrettable as it has
been published by way of Turing Award Lecture."

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andrewcooke
so i guess this shows no-one is always right...

