John Backus's Quest to Solve the Software Crisis with Functional Programming

History of John Backus's functional programming project [draft]

I joined John Backus in 1974 to help refine his Red language, a functional system designed to overcome the complexity of conventional programming. Our work explored variable-free approaches and formal methods to address the software crisis, aiming to drastically reduce development costs. This project sought to replace the von Neumann bottleneck with a simpler, whole-entity framework, challenging the orthodoxy of IBM Research and the broader computer science community.