[OT] John Backus, 1924-2007

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Wed Mar 21 10:44:10 EDT 2007


John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in 
the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way 
for modern software, has died. He was 82.

Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he 
spent his career.

Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" — 
programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside 
the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" language because it abstracted 
that work — it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive 
system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.

"It was just a quantum leap. It changed the game in a way that has only 
happened two or three times in the computer industry," said Jim Horning, 
a longtime programmer who co-chairs the Association for Computing 
Machinery's award committee.

That organization gave Backus its 1977 Turing Award, one of the 
industry's highest accolades. Backus also won a National Medal of 
Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top 
honor from the National Academy of Engineering.

"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus told Think, the IBM 
employee magazine, in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, 
when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs 
for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming 
system to make it easier to write programs."
...
Known as a maverick who preferred jeans to IBM's buttoned-up, 
conservative style, Backus stayed with the company until his retirement 
in 1991. Among his other important contributions was a method for 
describing the particular grammar of computer languages. The system came 
to be known as Backus-Naur Form.

<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obit_backus;_ylt=AkZnB6duPP4XzG_.f8TAK0YDW7oF>

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com



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