The creator of Fortran language John Backus died

On 17 March, in the 83rd year of his life, John Backus died - the founder of the formal specification of programming languages ​​and the author of the first high-level language Fortran, awarded for his outstanding achievements the 1977 Turing Award. Throughout his career, he worked at IBM.

In his youth, Backus tried to study at the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Virginia, but was expelled from his second year for non-attendance. In the midst of the Second World War, he joined the US Army, after which he moved to New York and entered a radio-technical school. It was followed by studies at Columbia University and a master's degree in mathematics, with which he got a job at IBM in 1950.

Among other young scientists, John got into the department engaged in the development of a “fast” interpreter, which was supposed to greatly simplify human-computer interaction. Soon Backus took charge of this department and directed his work to the mainstream, which in 1954 led to the creation of the first version of the Fortran language and a convenient compiler for it. Despite the fact that FORTRAN was not the first high-level language, only he received at that time such a successful implementation, defining the development of the industry for many years to come.

“I didn’t like to write programs,” Backus said, “so when I worked on the classic IBM 701 on programs to calculate the trajectories of rockets, I began to invent a system that could make their creation easier.”
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In the late 50s Backus took an active part in the work on the Algol language (Algol-58 and its improvement - Algol-60, which is now called simply Algol). Algol, who had similar appointments with Fortran, gained wider popularity on the other side of the ocean - in Europe and the USSR. To date, it has retained its value as an excellent tool for publishing algorithms.

It was in the process of working on Algol Backus that he developed his normal form, which, after the improvements of Peter Naur, became known as the Backus-Naur form and was used to formally describe the syntax of algorithmic languages.

In 1991, Backus went on a well-deserved rest.