Lazy.

I read that John Backus died at age of 82 (Slashdot discussion), who happened to be the person who apparently led the team of developers that brought us FORTRAN.

I recalled his name because I was studying some BNF notations of several languages (described in this post). If you’re not sure what BNF is, well, try Wikipedia again.

There’s an interesting (and hilarious) quote from Backus:

“Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs for the 701.”

I hear productivity went up after his crack team of developers released the first version of FORTRAN. Which reminds me that a good developer is lazy in the sense of ‘why do things manually, if I can write a program to make that problem go away faster’. This also reminds me of the way how easy it is to create objects in C# without even thinking of properly disposing them because, well, the garbage collector does that automatically for you (or I should say, this applies to any language that uses a garbage collector). It almost makes me long to Delphi, just to feel less lazy.

Or maybe, I mean, less helpless: I mean, these objects, can I please make them dispose?

Please?