Act II Rising Action In 1977 the great computer scientist John Backus decided that the good part of computer programming was the expressions, and the bad part was the statements. - ThreadSky

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jamesbrock.bsky.social • 190 days ago

Act II Rising Action

In 1977 the great computer scientist John Backus decided that the good part of computer programming was the expressions, and the bad part was the statements.

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jamesbrock.bsky.social•190 days ago

In his Turing Award lecture entitled Can Programming Be Liberated from the Von Neumann Style, he condemned his language, Fortran, and all other languages, as “fat and weak.” Backus warned the that languages with statements would “make their expressive weakness and their cancerous growth inevitable.”

jamesbrock.bsky.social•190 days ago

Later, at IBM, Backus tried to create a language named Function Level which could say do-this-thing-then-do-that-thing using only expressions. IBM never published the Function Level language, and the source code was lost.

https://worrydream.com/refs/Backus_1978_-_Can_Programming_Be_Liberated_from_the_von_Neumann_Style.pdf

jamesbrock.bsky.social•190 days ago

Act III Climax and Resolution

In 1987 the great computer scientists Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler decided that the good part of computer programming was the expressions, and the bad part was the statements.

jamesbrock.bsky.social•190 days ago

Wadler solved the problem of saying do-this-thing-then-do-that-thing using only expressions by adopting the Monad described by logician Eugenio Moggi.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/baastad.pdf

jamesbrock.bsky.social•190 days ago

In 1997 Wadler and Jones published the Haskell language, so now in Haskell we can program do-this-thing-then-do-that-thing by using only IO Monad expressions, no statements. Happily, forever.

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