Oral History of John Backus
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it because hearing pioneers explain early computing in their own words conveys the context and excitement of the era.
What it is
Grady Booch interviews John Backus, who led the IBM team that created FORTRAN in 1957, for the Computer History Museum in 2006. Backus describes the development of the first successful high-level language and its compiler. The interview runs 88 minutes.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2019 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec charlysl · 2019-07 · on “Fernando Corbató, a Father of Your Computer (and Your Password), Has Died”
Exactly, this is why I shared this video. Hearing concepts explained by those who pioneered them really brings them home, because it highlights the context in which they were created, with a description of what was the trouble with computing back then and how it was solved, and the excitement of the achievement. For instance, he situates his breaktrought in a timeline where the main milestones are, first, getting computers to work at all, and, then, high level languages, to make them much easier to program (Fortran, [this video] ). Then, time sharing made them much easier to use. The birth of the terminal, no less, which is still around and which we all take for granted (I know it's deeper than t
Cites mpweiher · 2021-12 · on “Why Architecture Oriented Programming Matters (2019)”
> If "constraining architecture" means any separation of concerns or interface. It doesn't. It means you work with constraints, for example dataflow constraints. For example: [LINK] > I also thought the implementation was a little muddled Yes! That was the point of that section of the paper, that doing the straightforward thing leads to a muddle: "At this point, it becomes clear that our original strategy of updating the UI from the individual setter methods is probably not tenable in the long run." A little later: "As we have seen, even a conceptually very simple application such as a temperature converter quickly attracts significant complexity with non-obvious trade-offs once the requirem
Cites metazip · 2026-08 · on “History of John Backus's functional programming project [draft]”
Videos to FL and FP: John Backus: Function Level Programming and the FL Language 1987 ( [LINK] ), John Backus Group Meeting - IBM Research - 5 July 1989 ( [LINK] ), Backus on functional programming ( [LINK] ) from Original: Oral History of John Backus ( [this video] )