March 22, 2026
Backus drops a 1977 mic
Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? (1977) [pdf]
1977 legend slams bloated code—devs split: “go functional” vs “nice try”
TLDR: Backus’s 1977 Turing lecture dunked on bloated programming and championed a cleaner functional style. Today’s readers cheer its AI-era relevance, while others laugh about the forgotten “Applicative State Transition Systems” and argue whether bold ideas or everyday coding habits actually win.
A 1977 blast from the past is roasting today’s code. In his Turing Award lecture, John Backus—the mind behind FORTRAN and BNF (a formal way to define programming languages)—argued that conventional languages keep getting bigger, not better. He pitched a cleaner “functional” style, and the internet’s chiming in like it’s open mic night.
One nostalgic commenter calls the paper “seminal,” adding they met Backus at IBM and swear he’d double down on functional programming in the age of AI helpers. That set off a wave of “preach!” replies and a few side-eyes from folks who say functional code can be harder to write than the usual step-by-step or object-based styles. Translation: is Backus the oracle of our AI era, or just the godfather of a beautiful headache?
Then a plot twist: another commenter digs up Backus’s mention of “Applicative State Transition Systems”—an obscure paradigm that, well, never took off. Cue the crowd: half wonders if it’s a lost treasure for AI agents, half shrugs that some ideas belong in museums. Jokes flew that ASTS sounds like a 70s prog-rock band, and someone quipped the lecture is the original “your code’s bloated” subtweet.
Verdict: readers are torn between “Backus was right—go functional” and “cool lecture, but reality didn’t budge.” The debate feels fresh because the stakes—AI writing more of our code—just got real.
Key Points
- •John Backus received the 1977 ACM Turing Award at the ACM Annual Conference in Seattle on October 17.
- •Backus led an IBM group in New York City that created Fortran and developed its first optimizing compiler.
- •Fortran became widely implemented across many computers and was adopted as a U.S. national standard in 1966.
- •Backus served on international committees that developed Algol 58 and Algol 60, influential in Europe.
- •In 1959, Backus introduced a formal syntax notation (BNF) at a UNESCO conference in Paris, with contributions recognized from Peter Naur.