From jls@liverpool.ac.uk Fri Oct 22 11:01:10 1993 Received: from mail.liv.ac.uk by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA03042 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Fri, 22 Oct 1993 11:01:10 +0100 Received: from 138.253.31.200 by mailhub.liverpool.ac.uk with SMTP (PP) id <12999-0@mailhub.liverpool.ac.uk>; Fri, 22 Oct 1993 10:59:25 +0100 From: "Dr.J.L.Schonfelder" Message-Id: <9310220959.AA04924@uxb.liv.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Your Personal Copy of my Rebuttal of John Backus' Prize To: FS300022@Sol.YorkU.CA Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 10:59:19 BST Cc: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk (SC22/WG5 members) In-Reply-To: <01H4E75VGALC8ZEFWC@Sol.YorkU.CA>; from "FS300022@Sol.YorkU.CA" at Oct 22, 93 12:41 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 I believe your comments to be of the "tilting at windmills variety", and seriously out of touch with reality, not mention being in ill mannered and in bad taste. I spent a goodly part of my career writing code for the same algorithms in both Fortran and and Algol-60. The latter was more elegant but rather less effective. Algol-68 was and in many respects still is the most beautiful procedural language ever designed. I wrote many large production codes in it during the 70's and early 80's.(Ada would have been more successful perhaps if it had been based on Algol-68 rather than Pascal - to let my prejudices show) These statements are all irrelevant though. Computing is not an isolated academic dicipline. It is an industry with an academic arm that is an engineering subject on the whole, in spite of the mis-conceptions caused by the usual title of COMPUTER SCIENCE. As such computing is driven by commercial and market pressures rather more than by academic niceties of elegance and purity. To ignore these facts is to "spit into the wind". Academe has ignored the economic facts of life for many years and has gone on berating Fortran and its continued use; proposing that we all use: Algol-60,Algol-W,Algol-68,Pascal,simula.... to no avail. Now all of these languages have good points. Academe is a good test bed for trying new languages and investigating useful or otherwise linguistic functionality. But it should have recognised long ago that if these functionalities were going to benifit a large body of computer users they needed to be built into one of the major economic languages like Fortran. Computing is littered with the corpses of the technically superior product which did not make it in the market place. It is not sufficient to make the better mousetrap, you have to be able to market and sell it successfully as well. And if there is already good mousetrap out there it may not be reasonable to even try. Fortran was the first SUCCESSFUL high level language and John Bachus has rightly been honoured for its invention. -- Dr.J.L.Schonfelder Director, Computing Services Dept. University of Liverpool, UK Phone: +44(51)794 3716 FAX : +44(51)794 3759 email: jls@liv.ac.uk