John Backus won the Turing award in 1977 and gave a Turing Award Lecture with the same title. I was in the audience and it made a big impression on me. I had just finished my Masters degree in computer science and had decided to work for a few years before returning to grad school for more.
It was an interesting time to be in CS. To be fair, CS has remained interesting to me to this day. But back then, right out of school, I felt like I knew something about almost every area of CS, maybe not much but at least something. So everything seemed possible.
The field has become so large that even after a lifetime of working and studying in the field of CS, even a modest understanding of one slice of CS is all we can hope for. Nevertheless, it stays fascinating.
It was an interesting time to be in CS. To be fair, CS has remained interesting to me to this day. But back then, right out of school, I felt like I knew something about almost every area of CS, maybe not much but at least something. So everything seemed possible.
The field has become so large that even after a lifetime of working and studying in the field of CS, even a modest understanding of one slice of CS is all we can hope for. Nevertheless, it stays fascinating.