Wednesday March 21, 2007
Wednesday March 21, 2007 I read today that John Backus died. As a compiler writer he was of course one of my heroes. I'd met him twice, once at Carnegie Mellon as an EE undergrad and once at UNC Chapel Hill when I was in grad school. The occasion in Chapel Hill was quite memorable.
He was invited to do a colloqium talk about FP. It was quite well attended. He was introduced by Fred Brooks who gives John a very glowing intro. Mr. Backus then gets up to give his talk but first he launches into a rant about how he is embarrassed to be in a state that hasn't ratified the Equal Rights Amendment and that the NC legislature should ratify it and that he wasn't going to come back to NC until the ERA was ratified by NC. He got a lot of applause from the audience over this stance. What made it so memorable was the fact the Fred Brooks had testified against the ERA in the NC legislature so this was quite a slap in the face to him.
I'm guessing that John never returned to NC...