Thank you! I agree that the original paper is kind of all over the place, that many of its ideas turned out to be not very good, and that garbage collection is a huge productivity aid that covers most of the remaining benefits.<p>Another (possibly controversial) point is that &quot;word-at-a-time&quot; programming is sometimes the clearest solution to a problem, especially when you need to think about time and space complexity. The usual example is Knuth-Morris-Pratt. I wonder how Backus would express it?