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.

>>15
Functional programming is part of the domain theory scam. Domain theory disguises ``lambda calculus'' as ordinary math.

When ``functional programming theorists'' say ``lambda calculus'', they don't mean Church's formalism (strings of symbols with rewrite rules). They really mean the ``mathematical objects'' of domain theory.

After examining the appalling type structure of conventional languages, using the elegant tools developed by Dana Scott, it is surprising that so many of us remain passively content with that structure instead of energetically searching for new ones.

Scott was the inventor of domain theory. The ``elegant tools'' Backus used are the fundamental concepts of domain theory.

An object x is either an atom, a sequence <x1, ... , xn> whose elements xi are objects, or ⊥ ("bottom" or "undefined").

Backus introduced bottom from domain theory into programming.

Lazy evaluation also comes from domain theory.