Can Programming Be Liberated from the Functional Style?

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.