[Tfug] Note of Passage

[Jim Secan]

At 03:00 PM 3/20/2007 -0700, you wrote:
>> For all you (us) dinosaurs lurking on this list, slashdot reports that
>> John
>> W. Backus, leader of the IBM team that developed FORTRAN, has died.  As
>> one
>> who writes 80-90% of his code in FORTRAN, who has been known to dream in
>> FORTRAN (nightmare?), and still has a FORTRAN 80-column coding pad
>> (somewhere), I mark his passing as that of a old friend.
>
>Possibly a better known reference to John Backus is the Backus–Naur form
>(BNF) that is used to describe programming language grammars.  There is
>nary a CS student who has not heard of it.

Which would lead me directly to the well-known rant "Real Programmers Don't
Each Quiche (or Use Pascal)".  J. Backus' FORTRAN is "real programmer"
stuff, BNF is "quiche-eater" stuff.  Truly a man for all seasons.

Jim
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