John Backus: turd pusher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_programming_languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Von_Neumann_programming_languages

Backus tried to pass this off as scientific, but he was really passing turdware onto unsuspecting goyim.

It was the foundation for funding a whole class of programming language: the functional language with lazy evaluation.

Haskell and ``FP'' are also ``high-level abstract isomorphic copies of von Neumann architectures''.

declarations ↔ computer storage cells
pattern matching ↔ computer test-and-jump instructions
lazy evaluation ↔ fetching, storing instructions
expressions ↔ memory reference and arithmetic instructions.

The ``von Neumann bottleneck'' should be considered a financial bottleneck for ``PLT'' ``research''. ``Eliminating'' it with FP allows researchers to get grants for almost anything, without having to demonstrate any real-world benefits, because they say Backus already demonstrated them.

http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/history.pdf

The genesis of Haskell
In 1978 John Backus delivered his Turing Award lecture, “Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?” (Backus, 1978a), which positioned functional programming as a radical attack on the whole programming enterprise, from hardware architecture upwards. This prominent endorsement from a giant in the field—Backus led the team that developed Fortran, and invented Backus Naur Form (BNF)—put functional programming on the map in a new way, as a practical programming tool rather than a mathematical curiosity.

>>13

Functional programming is about distinguishing functionality in terms of pure and impure functions.

This is another myth. You have to actually read what Backus wrote, without falling for the marketing/scamming. Most of his scam was disproved in the 1970s and 1980s, when people wasted years trying to implement it. Even the name ``functional'' is a marketing/confidence trick, which associates ``it functions'' or ``it works'' in your mind. OOP started becoming popular after people were disillusioned with FP and the empty promises of its followers.

We only hear about successes, but I found at least 10 separate ``functional programming'' CPUs (not including Lisp computers, which is not ``FP'' in that sense). All of them were slower than ``von Neumann'' processors. When you compare them to array or vector processors, the distinction is even greater. The FP scammers were trying to destroy array processor research. Even today, they tell you linked lists are ``more mathematical'' than arrays. They also hate arrays because neural networks were superior to symbolic AI.

What you really mean (distinguishing side effects) has been around since the 1950s. This is why some languages distinguish between functions and subroutines/procedures. The Lispers got rid of this distinction and invented the ``impure function''.