Backus himself admitted this, in an interview circa 1995:
> Doing a functional language and combining it with the ability to do real things is very hard. And everybody has had a problem with it.[0]
Or, as the editors nonsensically summarize it:
> FP [the language] is not suited to many mundane programming tasks, particularly those that consist primarily of fetching data, updating it, and returning it to some database. Tasks such as updating an account balance are naturally suited to the von Neumann paradigm.
This book is for a general audience, but that's a particularly bad example since ledger accounts are just about the oldest form of append-only database. (edit, Like old enough that Chaucer makes a very raunchy joke about "double entry" bookkeeping.)
[0] From chapter 1 of _Out of Their Minds_, by Shasha and Lazere.
> Doing a functional language and combining it with the ability to do real things is very hard. And everybody has had a problem with it.[0]
Or, as the editors nonsensically summarize it:
> FP [the language] is not suited to many mundane programming tasks, particularly those that consist primarily of fetching data, updating it, and returning it to some database. Tasks such as updating an account balance are naturally suited to the von Neumann paradigm.
This book is for a general audience, but that's a particularly bad example since ledger accounts are just about the oldest form of append-only database. (edit, Like old enough that Chaucer makes a very raunchy joke about "double entry" bookkeeping.)
[0] From chapter 1 of _Out of Their Minds_, by Shasha and Lazere.