Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?

The father of Fortran, the first widely used programming language, used his Turing Award lecture to question everything he had built. Backus argued that conventional programming languages were prisoners of the von Neumann architecture — one instruction at a time, one word at a time — and that this "word-at-a-time bottleneck" infected not just performance but the way programmers think. He proposed functional programming as the escape route. The paper is remarkable as an act of intellectual honesty: the man who defined an era of programming stood up and said the paradigm was wrong. For anyone in product or technology leadership, it is a masterclass in the discipline of questioning your own most successful work.