Computing Pioneer John Backus Dies

John Backus, inventor of Fortran and the formal notation to describe language grammars known as Backus-Naur Form, died this week at the age of 82. Backus received the IEEE W.W. McDowell Award (1967), the National Medal of Science (1975) and the Turing Award (1977) for his pioneering work in Computer Science.

Fortran, which Backus invented in the 1950s, was the first high-level programming language. Prior to Fortran, programmers had to code in the computer's native assembly language. Fortran reduced the number of lines of code necessary to program the computer by a factor of 20. Fortran has evolved through the ensuing 50 years and is still in use today.

Backus-Naur Form (BNF) is widely used to describe the syntax of modern computer languages, and is taught in many Computer Science courses and textbooks today, including our CS405 Programming Languages class.

More information can be found at CNN and Wikipedia.