John Backus

John Backus
Backus in December 1989
Born
John Warner Backus

(1924-12-03)December 3, 1924
DiedMarch 17, 2007(2007-03-17) (aged 82)
Alma materUniversity of Virginia
University of Pittsburgh
Haverford College
Columbia University (B.S. 1949, M.S. 1950)
Known forSpeedcoding
FORTRAN
ALGOL
Backus–Naur form
Function-level programming
Spouses
Marjorie Jamison
(m. 1947⁠–⁠1966)
Barbara Una
(m. 1968; died 2004)

Children2
AwardsNational Medal of Science (1975)
Turing Award (1977)
Charles Stark Draper Prize (1993)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsIBM

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. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"[1]

The IEEE awarded Backus the W. W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.[2] He received the National Medal of Science in 1975[3] and the 1977 Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages".[4]

John Backus retired in 1991. He died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17, 2007.[5]

  1. ^ Backus, John (August 1978). "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?: a functional style and its algebra of programs". Communications of the ACM. 21 (8). doi:10.1145/359576.359579. S2CID 16367522.
  2. ^ "W. Wallace McDowell Award". Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
  3. ^ "The President's National Medal of Science: John Backus". National Science Foundation. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved March 21, 2007.
  4. ^ "ACM Turing Award Citation: John Backus". Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on February 4, 2007. Retrieved March 22, 2007.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference nytobit was invoked but never defined (see the help page).