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John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages.
John Backus was a gifted problem-solver who created the first widely used, high-level programming language, Fortran, and developed the Backus-Naur Form for describing programming languages. He also worked on the IBM 704 and Speedcode, and received the National Medal of Science and the Turing Award.
John Warner Backus (born Dec. 3, 1924, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died March 17, 2007, Ashland, Ore.) was an American computer scientist and mathematician who led the team that designed FORTRAN (formula translation), the first important algorithmic language for computers.
John Backus was a mathematician and computer scientist who created Fortran, one of the first high-level programming languages. He also invented the Backus-Naur Form, a notation for describing grammatical rules, and received the National Medal of Science and the Turing Award.
Jun 14, 2024 · John Backus was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1924. He received an MS in mathematics from Columbia University (1950). Shortly before he graduated, Backus interviewed at IBM and was hired to work on programming their new computer systems.
John Backus, Fortran’s primary author, described the process as “hand-to-hand combat with the machine,” with the machine often winning. The cost of programmers was usually at least as great as the cost of the computers, and programmers spent up to half their time debugging.
Sep 5, 2023 · John Backus was a pioneer in computer programming languages, especially FORTRAN, and a recipient of the ACM Turing award. He worked at IBM Watson Lab at Columbia University from 1950 to 1952 and corresponded with Frank da Cruz, a computer historian at Columbia.
