Clinamen

John W. Backus, the developer who led the creation of Fortran, died on Saturday.

When I was an undergrad, you had to take Pascal first. This was not awesome. We were told right at the beginning that we were learning a dead language. This is something that the authors of SICP found especially disturbing, so they attempted to build a text around Lisp so that students could learn how to build programs with a flexible "less idiosyncratic" language. This is something I dealt with in my RSA paper last year, but i digress...

Anyway after we were finished with that dead language, we moved on to Fortran...a less dead language I guess. The whole thing was very "let's-learn-Latin-because-it-will-help-with-all-of-the-romantic-languages." Still, as the NYTimes article notes, Fortan was an important step:

Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.

This "important step" is especially interesting to me because it seems to be a move toward making programming more "human friendly." There have been a number of languages that have attempted this, and I wonder if the whole push isn't about getting to a "transparent" language...one that allows us to "speak" to the computer the way we speak to other humans. Then again, a number of programmers will insist that programming isn't about communicating with the machine at all - it's about communicating with other programmers.

At any rate, computer programming has lost an important figure. Backus was the epitomy of a hacker. Too smart for college (failed out of the University of Virginia) and a rule-breaker (caused a bunch of trouble in prep school.)