I just read on Lambda the Ultimate that John Backus passed away this past Saturday.
In his speech accepting the Turing Award, John Backus admonishes developers and computer scientists to look towards functional programing. He states that the composability and mathematical rigor of functional programming empowers programmers to scale and best describe the ever increasing complexity of problems. Interestingly, Backus describes the von Neumann architecture and its associate imperative programming language as obese. Backus continues saying that these obesities encourage micro-managed word at a time computing. Instead of moving data between named locations, we should focus on the larger conceptual units of the problem says Backus.
I see this debilitating behavior every day, both in developers and managers. Most IS/IT managers get caught up in the word at a time or task at a time work flow that cripples teams and organizations. Senior developers and managers must be instructors and mentors in the enterprise. They must be experience practitioners of abstraction and modeling. Their first and most important priority must be to impart the skills of scale, abstraction, modeling, and reuse to those they mentor.
