“This guy’s arrogance takes your breath away”I was in Washington, DC over Memorial Day weekend, consulting the Library of Congress for a paper I’m writing about the early history of programming languages. The LoC houses the John W Backus papers, a collection of 12 boxes. As you may recall, Backus helped invent FORTRAN, ALGOL, Backus-Naur form, and a few other things that computer scientists might be aware of. The Backus papers are a collecti
