Reading that interview was a strange experience. It was made in 2006, as J. Backus was approaching 81 years old, one year before he passed away. He seemed not a very talkative man, but quite fun and humble, not taking too seriously the achievements he made in his life.
"Programming is a pretty low-level enterprise"
I have not learned more about the beginnings of Fortran, but interestingly discovered that he did not seem to be someone passionate about programming, as we may think. On the contrary, my feeling is his work was, in a certain sense, mainly about getting rid of programming!
- Speedcoding and Fortran were about getting rid of machine language programming. And I feel the effort of people coding fpm and the stdlib is similar: getting rid of reinventing the wheel, a quite common syndrome in our Fortran world.
- His work on functional programming (or rather function-level programming) was an attempt to get rid of Von Neumann programming style: "Basically, the idea was to try to describe the transformation that you wanted to take place, rather than how to do it. "
He seemed rather a mathematical mind (Masters in Mathematics) and was more proud of his work on what he called functional programming than on Fortran:
- “Well, I guess the question of it still seems that programming is a pretty low-level enterprise, and that somebody ought to be thinking about how to make it higher; really higher level than it is.”
- “Actually that functional programming was an effort to try to go up a level, so that you didn’t have to keep saying how to do everything, but rather say what you wanted done.”
A wise man’s conclusion
Interviewer: “Is the world a better place because of all the software that’s been written in your lifetime, or not?”
Backus: “Well, in human terms, probably not. Because it just takes us further and further away from human affairs. But as far as economic, and welfare, it’s done a lot of good. So it’s a mixed bag.
…
But I don’t envy you, I’m afraid. I think that we’re getting more and more technological and less and less human oriented.”
His advice to young people in High School: “Well, don’t go into software. It’s just such a complicated mess that you just frazzle your brains trying to do anything worthwhile.”
And I am not sure it’s a joke… Half a joke?