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Peter Naur has died
- cperciva 11y agoVia Poul-Henning Kamp: https://twitter.com/bsdphk/status/683750072841072640 https://twitter.com/bsdphk/status/683750072841072640 I haven't seen any "official" announcement, so I figured Peter Naur's wikipedia page was the best link to use.
- jmartinpetersen 11y agoThere's an article in Danish at http://www.version2.dk/artikel/datalogi-pioneren-peter-naur-er-doed-538017 http://www.version2.dk/artikel/datalogi-pioneren-peter-naur-... DIKU (University of Copenhagen Department of Computer Science) linked to that one. Naur was the first professor at DIKU and one of the founders of the institute.
- s_dev 11y agoI think he deserves a black bar? Anyone else think so? He has some serious contributions in that lifetime to the world of Comp Sci and general hackery. How do we vote to initiate a black bar?
- cpach 11y agoGood idea! I suggest you send an e-mail to hn@ycombinator.com
- bdr 11y agoWe don't. It's best to just leave it up to the mods.
- mintplant 11y agoSometimes I think introducing the black bar was a mistake. Now every death has to be judged as to whether the person is "worthy" or not of a black bar. This caused a lot of tension in the threads about Ian Murdock's death, for example.
- mschuster91 11y agoAgreed, but what angered me a bit about Murdock's death is how fast it fell off front despite iirc over 1300 upvotes.
- shawn-butler 11y agoThe editorializing choices regarding Ian on HN made by staff were poor at best. Not surprised they locked discussion down. But, this is a different topic. Any Turing award winner deserves recognition and reflection on their passing imho.
- chris_wot 11y agoI'm not sure I'm following this comment. What editorializing did the HN staff do? I didn't see any. If anything, I may have inadvertently got it caught up in some sort of flame filter because of a comment I wrote about asking for help if you feel suicidal, then (seemingly, but not actually) contradicting myself later by saying that medical help may not be the best solution. Flame filters, AFAIK, kick in automatically. Mental health is a hot button issue, and flame fests and controversial discussions are really not good or appropriate for HN. I should know, I've been part of a few and have to remember when to take a step back.
- someone7x 11y agoI'm only aware of the black bar because of the discussions that inevitably seem to describe its absence for a given person.
- agumonkey 11y agoIt's indeed trouble inducing. But Naur's name has been printed and mentioned in classes since forever. It's a pretty strong threshold.
- xyzzy4 11y agoPerhaps but I doubt he'll make the cut.
- smegel 11y agoNever heard of him, but I think I need to know about him. I find this book he wrote to be very enticing: > Computing: A Human Activity Sounds like a forerunner to Agile programming.
- nine_k 11y agoIsn't he the N in BNF?
- bootload 11y agoBNF (formal abstract systems) is baked into the structure of the Internet. Knuth himself suggested BNF be referred to as "Backus–Naur Form" in '64. [1] Reference [0] For example RFC5511: "Routing Backus-Naur Form (RBNF): A Syntax Used to Form Encoding Rules in Various Routing Protocol Specifications" https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5511 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5511 [1] "backus normal form vs. Backus Naur form" http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=355588.365140 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=355588.365140
- fsloth 11y agoPeter Naur's paper 'Programming as theory building' is perhaps the most lucid, thought provoking and practically usefull single thing I have ever read on the sociological aspects of software engineering. Right there with the Brook's "Mythical man month" ( but the value density of the former is much higher, since it's a paper and the latter is a book).
- wclax04 11y agoLink to the paper: http://www.dc.uba.ar/materias/plp/cursos/material/programmingAsTheoryBuilding http://www.dc.uba.ar/materias/plp/cursos/material/programmin...
- hcrisp 11y agoBriefly looking at the paper, it seems what he calls the "theory of the program" is akin to what Fred Brooks called "conceptual integrity". Am I wrong?
- dang 11y agoI think that's right. The terms 'design' and 'model' are often used for this nowadays. Naur's point is that a program is a shared mental construct that lives in the minds of the people who build it. The source code is not the program. It's the canonical written representation, but a lossy one.
- jasode 11y agoIt also has a lot of overlap with the concept of "tacit knowledge": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge The programmer is unable to completely and unambiguously articulate the "design" in source code and documentation. Yes, the source code can be improved with with longer names of variables and functions in addition to liberal code comments. And documentation can be expanded to include chapters on "architectural overview" and "technical motivations" to help fill the gaps but it will inevitably be incomplete.
- santiagobasulto 11y ago
- mixmax 11y agoIt's interesting how many programming languages were made by Danes. Nauer of course contributed to algol60, but did you know PHP was written by Rasmus Lerdorrf, Anders Hejlsberg developed delphi, turbo pascal and C#, Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++, Ruby on Rails was developed by DHH. All Danes. Given a nation of 5 million people I think this is quite unusual.
- nulldata 11y agoYeah, makes me proud to be a Dane.
- b6 11y agoI don't want to be unpleasant at all. But let's please not build up artificial walls between us. Humans moved to different parts of the world and developed slightly differently. But let's not think that being born into the "same" culture or ethnic group gives anyone some kind of password to share in some achievement. I also admire this man's work and am grateful for his intelligence and efforts.
- dracht 11y ago>But let's not think that being born into the "same" culture or ethnic group gives anyone some kind of password to share in some achievement. Why not? He is a contributor to the culture that produces a disproportionate amount of successful computer scientists. If these walls were artificial, there would be no disparity.
- pkofod 11y agoIt's not so much that you're entitled to anything because you're of a certain ethnicity or belong to a certain culture, but if we have 200 different cultures, and some metric that we want to perform well according to, should we not try to learn from those cultures who excel? Saying that being proud of a culture is building walls and thus bad is over-the-top PC. Just because I am proud (of something) does not mean that I don't want to share it with you if you want to give it a go. You're acting as if "I'm proud to be Danish, 'cus look at all these great CS Danes" is the same as saying "We need to be the only nation in the world, and we want to wipe out everyone who thinks differently." Being proud is great, as long as you don't turn blind to other people's value and worth.
- orionblastar 11y agoInteresting that ALGOL 60 inspired other languages such as Pascal and C as well as Ada, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60
- poizan42 11y agoAlso Naur did have a good deal of the responsibility for getting support for recursion into Algol 60: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/ https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-... Just think how the programming language landscape might look today if recursion had never gotten into mainstream languages, or maybe only had begun to become the norm recently.
- scoot 11y agoI first became aware of computers as a thing with the launch of 8-bit home computers in the early 80s. As a result, I seem to have a hard time imagining the computing scene before then, as in the 80s it seemed so nascent - so the fact that computers were a big enough of a thing in 1959 for there to be a Danish Institute of Computing blows my mind. Everything before the 80s seems so abstract. Any recommended reading / viewing to try to rebate by historical perspective?
- philjr 11y agoSome interesting reading here http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/engineer/comphist/dan_hist.htm http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/engineer/comphist/dan_hist.h...
- neffy 11y agoThe Psychology of Computer Programming. Gerald M. Weinberg 1971 and: The Soul of a New Machine Tracy Kidder 1981 ought to be required reading for anybody in tech.
- dandrews 11y agoI'll easily second this recommendation. 30 years ago I was struck by Tom West's quote from Kidder's book: "Not everything worth doing is worth doing well".
- dopeboy 11y agoAnyone that has taken a compiler class has written something in BNF. RIP.
- jarmitage 11y agoCan anyone recommend (a) good resource(s) for learning about BNF?
- mahmud 11y agoThe Wikipedia page does a good enough job. It shouldn't take more than 1-3 pages, it's a fairly simple concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form#Example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form#Examp... I stumbled into compilers by accidentally buying the Dragon book as a teen. BNF part I got through fairly quickly.
- lovelearning 11y agoJack Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler" [1], starting from Part 2. [1]: http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/ http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/
- Tistel 11y agoIts a bit weird being a small part of computer science. The big early movers and shakers were still around for most of our lives. The whole field is within living memory. Now they are starting to pass away. Engelbart, McArthy etc. Think how far physics got from Newton to the Manhattan project. Where will CS be in 100 years? We have so much work to do.
- Lordarminius 11y agoIts interesting that you say this. I made a similar point some time ago on another forum but I was ignored and even down voted there(no prize for guessing which forum that was) My idea was that you could gauge how far along a field has come by whether the pioneers were still alive/how far removed you were from them. CS despite huge advances is still in its toddler years. So, yes. More work to do and exciting days ahead.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoHow does your idea handle situations when a field gets renamed, or simply subdivided? E.g. Newton died long ago, but pioneers of quantum chromodynamics are still alive and kicking.
- Lordarminius 11y agoI cant truly say I have considered that angle. But I suppose subdividing a field creates new pioneers and a new field. Renaming it- that's a more tricky situation.(And I have no idea what quantum chromodynamics is!)
- rimantas 11y agoIn physics we reverse engineer a very complex system given to us. In CS we create the system ourselves and there is some overlap with mathematics, so I doubt the progress will be as drastical.
- coldtea 11y ago>Think how far physics got from Newton to the Manhattan project. Where will CS be in 100 years? We have so much work to do. Might not be so. You're applying the same progress curve to both, but remember that Newton developed his theories at the start (or close) of the scientific era, without so many institutions, collaborations, communications, infrastructure, experimental apparatus, computer simulations, the necessary math etc. Computing was developed in the middle (or close) of the 20th century, and had all that. It also saw much faster development cycles, so the speedup curve we saw with physics since Newton won't really apply to it (I mean not in the same timescale: it could still apply "compressed" in the last 5 decades). I'd say we're already in the Manhattan project era of computing. And with Moore's law expiring and other limits reached in those areas, we wont be moving that faster in the future -- mostly like Physics did since 50s.
- ldesegur 11y agoWill HN have a black banner to remember him?
- morenoh149 11y agolink to a retyped version of the revised "Report on the algorithmic language: algol 60" http://datamuseum.dk/site_dk/rc/algol/algol60retyped.pdf http://datamuseum.dk/site_dk/rc/algol/algol60retyped.pdf a very famous paper
- protomyth 11y agoI guess I should be grateful that our profession gets to live in the same time as the masters. RIP
- mgpwr_new 11y ago:(
- leonroy 11y agoLiterally spent last night reading up on the work he did on BNF. He sounded like a very capable and rather rarely, a modest man.