Submitted by 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, Oregon, according to IBM, 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’ programming 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.
I hope he has a happy life where he’s headed. I don’t know, but I think he deserves it.
It’s odd. My ITEC professor and I were just discussing the other day how — with the exception of a few notable mathematicians — most of the pioneers of the computer generation are still around, an influence if not an active factor.
As that old corps who first brought the computer out of the lab and into businesses and homes passes on, the nature of our industry (our subculture?) is going to change. Maybe smoothly, mabye radically, I don’t know.
Edited 2007-03-20 21:51
I’m not even a programmer and I know what John Backus did for computer science and the IT industry. It sad to hear he passed away and I hope the industry will pay they’re respects to one of it’s greatest innovators.
Rest in peace Mr.Backus.
It’s rather unfair to remember Mr Backus for his creation of FORTRAN right back in the early days of computing. He went on to produce some pioneering work on modern language design, as his Turing Award lecture ( http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf ) shows.
I’m confident his work has either influenced or impacted (or both) millions globally. His BNF was and still is a fundamental tool for aspiring programmers at University and College educational institutions.
I used and was tested on it extensively and learnt a great deal about software development from this and his other works.
Rest in peace. Well earnt.
When i first learned and used Fortran, the oldest of the high level programming languages in history, i assumed Mr Backus was not alive… then suddenly i realized about my stupid assumption… and now it’s real… how strange!
Thanks for the great time whatsoever is due to him!
FORTRAN IV was the 3rd programming language I learned after COBOL and RPG (Report Programming Generator).
Say what you want about FORTRAN and the other two but at least they didn’t have pointers. While I know how to program using them (pointers), it just seems so stupid to have to after learning those others first.
How about some articles about Mr. Backus and the other language and OS inventors so the younger people can have a better understanding of life before Apple, Microsoft, and Linux. Just because personal computers didn’t exist doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of exciting history.
Oh, for for those who haven’t read it. “The Soul Of A New Machine” is a great book about people creating a new computer back in the 70s. It’s kind of like “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Riding” for us motorcycle riders.
FORTRAN and BNF grammars – **excellent** work by Backus.
I help out a bit with a project on Sourceforge which uses BNF grammars extensively. They’re great – a very simple, easy and elegant way to code up a programming language.
John Backus – “you da man!”.
John Backus, developer of Fortran, dies at 82
By Brian Bergstein
The Associated Press
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.
Before 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” programming 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.
The breakthrough earned Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry’s highest accolades. The citation praised Backus’ “profound, influential, and lasting contributions.”
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.”
John Warner Backus was born in Wilmington, Del., in 1924. His father was a chemist who became a stockbroker. Backus had what he would later describe as a “checkered educational career” in prep school and the University of Virginia, which he left after six months. After being drafted into the Army, Backus studied medicine but dropped it when he found radio engineering more compelling.
Backus finally found his calling in math, and he pursued a master’s degree at Columbia University in New York.
Shortly before graduating, Backus toured the IBM offices in midtown Manhattan and came across the company’s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, an early computer stuffed with 13,000 vacuum tubes. Backus met one of the machine’s inventors, Rex Seeber — who “gave me a little homemade test and hired me on the spot,” Backus recalled in 1979.
Backus’ early work at IBM included computing lunar positions on the balky, bulky computers that were state of the art in the 1950s. But he tired of hand-coding the hardware, and in 1954 he got his bosses to let him assemble a team that could design an easier system.
The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20.
It showed skeptics that machines could run just as efficiently without hand-coding. A wide range of programming languages and software approaches proliferated, although Fortran also evolved over the years and remains in use.
Backus remained with IBM until his retirement in 1991. Among his other important contributions was a method for describing the particular grammar of computer languages. The system is known as Backus-Naur Form.
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
Eek. You are making me feel blue.
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’ programming 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.
Was nobody using assembly language or assemblers in the 1950s then?
It’s still used extensively. With Fortran Backus showed to a very skeptical audience that compilers were viable.
“Was nobody using assembly language or assemblers in the 1950s then?”
Yes they were but not much. And Fortran is a LOT easier and faster to write programs in than assembler.
….And Fortran is still widely used. You don’t think so? Perhaps in the computer science and IT world we’ve moved on to more modern languages, but as an engineer I can tell you that Fortran is alive and kicking; especially in the Aerospace industry.
Plenty of coroporations still use and even maintain extensive applications written decades ago in Fortran. And tons of older engineers who started using fortran 20 or 30 or 40 years ago STILL turn to it before any other language when they need to use the computer to automate a task or complete and algorithm.
Slowly, as fresher engineers trained in languages like Matlab and Java enter the industry, things are changing. But because of existing applications, I can tell you Fortran skills will be needed for at least a couple more decades.
Sometimes this is frustrating for me, and when I’m forced to use Fortran I miss all the features I’m used to from modern languages. But then I remember this was basically the first stab at a language EVER. When I think about how bad it COULD have been, I’m grateful that Mr. Backus was such a smart dude.
Thanks, and Rest in Peace.
The airline I used to work for had most of the critical flight and cargo operations programs written in FORTRAN, mainly F66 and F77 with UNIVAC extentions, and even the “new” flight planning system they replaced the old one with still has a FORTRAN core.
At the company I work for now (an airline/transportation industry solutions provider), the older software I work on right now related to visa/passport processing is all written in FORTRAN, and many of the other airline-related applications we have are FORTRAN (fares, reservations, etc.).
New stuff is written in other languages, but most of the older systems are being maintained as FORTRAN code until a rewrite is seen as being cost-effective.
Yes, there are better languages out there, but FORTRAN has lasted longer (and has done more for the computer industry) than I think anyone ever anticipated.
Thank you, Mr. Backus, for creating something which works so very well…
______WRITE(5,100)
__100 FORMAT(14HREST IN PEACE.)
______STOP
______END
He’s simply moved to an alternate storage format… dust.
I prefer to thank mr. Backus for the BNF forms; they have compelled absolutely great with what we know today as programming and compiling. Thank God for him!
God bless that man