John Backus (1924 - 2007) was an American computer scientist who led the IBM team that developed FORTRAN, the first widely adopted high-level programming language.[1] His work made computer programming dramatically more accessible and helped establish software as a discipline. He also gave his name to the Backus-Naur Form, a standard notation for describing the syntax of programming languages.[2]
Early life and education
John Backus was born on December 3, 1924, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After an uneven early academic record, he served in the United States Army during World War II before pursuing higher education.[1] He studied at the University of Virginia and later enrolled at Columbia University in New York, where he earned a master's degree in mathematics in 1949.
FORTRAN
Backus joined IBM in 1950 and soon began advocating for a system that would let programmers express calculations in a form closer to mathematics rather than in cumbersome machine code. From the mid-1950s he led a team that developed FORTRAN (from "Formula Translation"), released in 1957 for the IBM 704.[1] FORTRAN was the first high-level programming language to gain wide use, and it demonstrated that an automatic translator could produce efficient machine code, overcoming widespread skepticism that compiled programs could rival hand-written assembly.
Backus-Naur Form
In the late 1950s Backus contributed to the design of ALGOL, an influential international programming language. To describe its grammar precisely, he devised a formal notation that, with refinements by Peter Naur, became known as the Backus-Naur Form (BNF).[2] BNF is still used to specify the syntax of programming languages and remains a foundational tool in computer science.
Later work
In his later career Backus turned to research on alternatives to conventional programming. In his 1977 Turing Award lecture, "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?", he argued for function-level programming and criticized the assignment-based model that dominates most languages.[3]
Awards and legacy
Backus was named an IBM Fellow and received many of computing's highest honors, including the National Medal of Science in 1975, the ACM Turing Award in 1977, and the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 1993.[4] He died on March 17, 2007, in Ashland, Oregon. His work on FORTRAN and on formal language notation shaped the practice of programming for generations and is regarded as among the most consequential contributions to the field.
