Cited on HN 3 times, 2019–2026, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN points to it as the primary source for Backus's ideas on programming beyond the von Neumann style, in threads about dead technologies and obscure languages.
A 1987 talk in which John Backus, creator of Fortran, presents function-level programming and the FL language, a successor to his FP work. It is an archival recording with links to the related paper.
John Backus's FL: [this video] IBM research really should release the FL compiler they wrote! They stopped working on it in the early 90s, and haven't said a single thing about it since. There is the beginnings of a Haskell implementation that I tried to mess with a bit, but I don't know enough Haskell to get anywhere: [link]
I see FP [0] (and FL [1,2]) as continuations of the original APL vision – an algebra for programs. It is really nice to see this implementation of FP and I hope it will spark interest in the community. :) [0]: [link] [1]: [link] [2]: [this video]
Videos to FL and FP: John Backus: Function Level Programming and the FL Language 1987 ( [this video] ), John Backus Group Meeting - IBM Research - 5 July 1989 ( [link] ), Backus on functional programming ( [link] ) from Original: Oral History of John Backus ( [link] )
Backus presenting function level programming and FL
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
3 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.