{"id":1453,"date":"2007-03-20T23:23:32","date_gmt":"2007-03-21T02:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1453"},"modified":"2007-10-06T10:02:05","modified_gmt":"2007-10-06T13:02:05","slug":"lazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1453","title":{"rendered":"Lazy."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">I<\/span> read that <a href='http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?attachment_id=1454' rel='attachment wp-att-1454' title='A genuine garbage collector'><img class=\"alignright\" src='http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/a_garbage_collector.thumbnail.jpg' alt='A genuine garbage collector' \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/03\/19\/obituaries\/20cnd-backus.html?ex=1332043200&#038;en=adde3ee5a1875330&#038;ei=5124&#038;partner=permalink&#038;exprod=permalink\">John Backus died at age of 82<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/developers.slashdot.org\/developers\/07\/03\/20\/0223234.shtml\">Slashdot discussion<\/a>), who happened to be the person who apparently led the team of developers that brought us <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/FORTRAN\">FORTRAN<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p>I recalled his name because I was studying some BNF notations of several languages (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1429\">described in this post<\/a>). If you&#8217;re not sure what BNF is, well, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form\">try Wikipedia again<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s an interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/www-03.ibm.com\/ibm\/history\/exhibits\/builders\/builders_backus3.html\">(and hilarious) quote from Backus<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"quote\">&#8220;Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8216;why do things manually, if I can write a program to make that problem go away faster&#8217;. 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.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe, I mean, less helpless: I mean, these objects, can <em>I<\/em> please make them dispose?\n<\/p>\n<p>Please?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1453\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,4],"tags":[88],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}