| ▲ | nyrikki 15 hours ago | |
Here is John Backus' original paper[0], which is an easy read, but note what he calls functional programming_ has nothing to do with lambda calculus, Haskel etc... it is the APL family. He is absolutely one of IBM's historical rockstars. IMHO they are invoking him to sell their NorthPole chips which have on-die memory distributed between the processing components and probably has value. > In its simplest form a von Neumann computer has three parts: a central processing unit (or CPU), a store, and a connecting tube that can transmit a single word between the CPU and the store (and send an address to the store). I propose to call this tube the yon Neumann bottleneck. The task of a program is to change the contents of the store in some major way; when one considers that this task must be accomplished entirely by pumping single words back and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck, the reason for its name becomes clear. IMHO IBM is invoking John Backus' work to sell what may be an absolutely great product but are really just ASICs and don't relate to his machine or programming language limits. | ||