From mellis@vax.ox.ac.uk Wed Jun 2 18:56:29 1993 Received: from oxmail.ox.ac.uk by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA15228 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Wed, 2 Jun 1993 19:02:08 +0200 Received: from vax.ox.ac.uk by oxmail.ox.ac.uk with SMTP (PP) id <22223-0@oxmail.ox.ac.uk>; Wed, 2 Jun 1993 17:57:12 +0100 Received: by vax.ox.ac.uk (MX V3.3 VAX) id 18979; Wed, 02 Jun 1993 17:56:51 +0100 Date: Wed, 02 Jun 1993 17:56:29 +0100 From: Miles Ellis To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Cc: mellis@vax.ox.ac.uk Message-Id: <0096D6F7.B524BAF0.18979@vax.ox.ac.uk> Subject: Plus ca change ..... X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 I was recently reading some papers from the 1978 ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages conference (fascinating reading for those not familiar with it), and I came across a number of delightful quotes from the paper by John Backus about the origins of Fortran. There's lots more, but how about the following: "As far as we were aware, we simply made up the language as we went along. We did not regard language design as a difficult problem, merely a simple prelude to the real problem: designing a compiler which could produce efficient programs." "It was our belief that if FORTRAN, during its first few months, were to translate any reasonable "scientific" source program into an object program only half as fast as its hand coded counterpart, then acceptance of our system would be in serious danger." "To this day [1978] I believe that our emphasis on object program efficiency rather than on language design was basically correct. I believe that had we failed to produce efficient programs, the widespread use of languages like FORTRAN would have been seriously delayed." ".... in spite of all the fuss that has been made over myriad language details, current conventional languages are still very weak programming aids, and far more powerful languages would be in use today if anyone had found a way to make them run with adequate efficiency. In other words, the next revolution in programming will take place only when _both_ of the following requirements have been met: (a) a new kind of programming language, far more powerful than those of today, has been developed and (b) a technique has been found for executing its programs at not much greater cost than that of today's programs." and finally ".... while it was perhaps natural and inevitable that languages like FORTRAN and its successors should have developed out of the concept of the von Neumann computer as they did, the fact that such languages have dominated our thinking for twenty years is unfortunate [35 years now!]. It is unfortunate because their long-standing familiarity will make it hard for us to understand and adopt new programming styles which one day will offer far greater intellectual and computational power." Miles Miles Ellis Director: Educational Technology Resources Centre University of Oxford 37-41 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JF Telephone: +44 865 270528 Fax: +44 865 270527 Email: MEllis@vax.ox.ac.uk