John Backus passes away

Back when I was studying compiler design in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the name John Backus was often foremost in my mind. He was one-half of the team that developed the Backus-Naur Form, the notation that we used to define language syntax.

Backus, who passed away last Saturday, was one of the designers of the FORTRAN programming language. The 82-year-old computer scientist, who spent most of his professional life at IBM, won many awards, including the ACM’s A.M. Turing Award in 1977 and the Charles Stork Draper Prize in 1993.

You can read a detailed obituary at the New York Times. The IBM archives (from which I appropriated the photo) talks about the development of FORTRAN under Backus’ guidance in the late 1950s:

Most people, Backus says today, “think FORTRAN’s main contribution was to enable the programmer to write programs in algebraic formulas instead of machine language. But it isn’t. What FORTRAN did primarily was to mechanize the organization of loops.”

It’s a great story about a true computer science pioneer.