Backus and von Neumann have a history, from their time at IBM. When Backus first proposed the idea of Fortran to his boss, he first "had to overcome the persua

Backus and von Neumann have a history, from their time at IBM. When Backus first proposed the idea of Fortran to his boss, he first "had to overcome the persuasive arguments of von Neumann, who was then a consultant to IBM." In Backus' words: > He didn't see programming as a big problem. I think one of his major objections is that you wouldn't know what you were getting with floating point calculations. You at least knew where trouble was with fixed point if there was trouble. But he wasn't sensitive to the issue of the cost of programming. He really felt that Fortran was a wasted effort.[0] Backus and von Neumann had made innovations in the use of floating-point and fixed-point numbers by computers, respectively. From what I can gather, von Neumann was an incredible genius who just continuously pushed new ideas. He introduced "scaling factors" (fixed point) to solve a scientific problem (in nuclear physics) and didn't worry about improving its "usability." Backus, on the other hand, cared about the difficulty of programming. Both Fortran and his work on floating-point, as well as his later efforts in functional programming, manifested that. After leaving computing altogether, Backus took to meditation and, as he calls it, "living." [0] Quotes are from chapter 1 of Out of Their Minds: the Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, by Shasha and Lazere.