SLE 2025
Thu 12 - Fri 13 June 2025 Koblenz, Germany
co-located with STAF 2025
Fri 13 Jun 2025 09:15 - 10:30 at M 001 - SLE Keynote Chair(s): Vadim Zaytsev

In his 1977 ACM Turing Award Lecture, John Backus identified the word-at-a-time style of programming, inherited from the underlying hardware and dubbed the “von Neumann bottleneck”, as a major obstacle to the advancement of programming. In this keynote, I argue that the functional programming he advocated introduced its own bottleneck: that everything produced by a computation (including nothing) must be encoded as a single value. This “obligation to singularity” is foreign to modelling, where single values sit collegially between no values and two values. Exploring diverse examples, I will argue that adopting a modelling (de facto: relational) style of programming eliminates the functional bottleneck, and with it many of the data-to-control flow escapes that Backus originally sought to avoid.

Fri 13 Jun

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

09:00 - 10:30
SLE KeynoteSLE 2025 at M 001
Chair(s): Vadim Zaytsev University of Twente
09:00
15m
Day opening
SLE Second Day
SLE 2025

09:15
75m
Keynote
Can Programming Be Liberated from the Functional Style?
SLE 2025
K: Friedrich Steimann Fernuniversität in Hagen