never saw such a programm. 18 different tracks in 8 days. a conference where i would love to be cloned to attend most of it. speechless and kind of jealous. probably stuff for some years.

in respect the whole quote of their promotion:

The 2007 Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC) in San Diego in June will feature a quintet of discussions by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) on areas of long-term computing research. UC Berkeley's Christos Papadimitriou's talk, "The Algorithmic Lens: How the Sciences are Being Transformed by the Computational Perspective," will focus on how computational research is facilitating a metamorphosis in the physical, mathematical, social, and life sciences, an example being how quantum computation has been very helpful in drawing new insights about basic quantum physics principles. "Data-Intensive Super Computing: Taking Google-Style Computing Beyond Web Search," by Carnegie Mellon University's Randal Bryant, will detail how major breakthroughs in science, business, health care, and information access could be facilitated by the "Data-Intensive Super Computer" systems created by Web search engines to mine massive volumes of data from a wide array of sources, and emphasize the importance of getting the academic research community involved. UC Berkeley's Scott Shenker's "We Dream of GENI: Exploring Radical Network Designs" will talk about the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) proposal for constructing a facility to support large-scale network implementations designed to address various Internet problems, such as security, manageability, and reliability. "Future of Computer Architecture '07" from independent consultant Bob Colwell will discuss the end of the single-core general-purpose processor era and the multilayered challenge computer architecture faces to find a worthy successor to CMOS that supports the software's direct comprehension of the system architecture. CCC Chairman Ed Lazowska of the University of Washington will wrap up the FCRC with "Computer Science: Past, Present and Future," which will offer examples of opportunities for computer science research that could emerge over the next 10 years. | fcrc

finally an official but short interview with fran allen

STRETCH was to be 100 times faster than any other machine. It wasn't. And the compiler didn't help. My language and compiler work for HARVEST was deemed successful, but who knows, since the application was classified. | acm

nice to see that karen spärck jones also gets some recognition and awards. for sure she is an impressive lady and the matron of the computer linguist society. - those sem people could learn a lot from her.

john backus 1924 - 2007 | messenger

Redefining Computing While it is perhaps natural and inevitable that languages like Fortran and its successors should have developed out of the concept of the von Neumann computer as they did, the fact that such languages have dominated our thinking for twenty years is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because their long-standing familiarity will make it hard for us to understand and adopt new programming styles which one day will offer far greater intellectual and computational power. —John Backus, 1981 | quoted in the road not taken, r. gabriel

john backus turing award lecture 1977:

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs:
... Each new language claims new and fashionable features, such as strong typing or structured control statements, but the plain fact is that few languages make programming sufficiently cheaper or more reliable to justify the cost of producing and learning to use them.

the history of fortran I, II and III | john backus, acm 1978