John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN 271
Posted
by
kdawson
from the go-to-considered-seminal dept.
from the go-to-considered-seminal dept.
A number of readers let us know of the passing of John W. Backus, who assembled a team to develop FORTRAN at IBM in the 1950s. It was the first widely used high-level language. Backus later worked on a "function-level" programming language, FP, which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" and is viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN. He received the 1977 ACM 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 seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages."
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm more inclined to thank him for all the other high level programming languages.
...viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN (Score:4, Insightful)
82 is a good innings. No matter what you think of FORTRAN as a language, I think it's safe to say that it, and later some of the other really early languages advanced computer science greatly during its infancy. We have a lot to thank Backus for.
Farewell John (Score:5, Insightful)
IMPLICIT NONE
PRINT *, 'Farewell John W. Backus'
STOP
END
*
* End indeed
*
FFS a person died... (Score:3, Insightful)
Show some respect instead of making lame FORTRAN jokes...
Be afraid, be very afraid (Score:5, Insightful)
No need to apologise (Score:3, Insightful)
(yes, yes, I know, he's no apologising in the usual sense; this is a play on words, or a pun, as it is also known)
Still, FORTRAN was and still is one of the great programming languages. There are many languages that offer better features and are much suitable for general usage, but there's huge number of programs written in FORTRAN, and many in science still prefer it to C/C++; FORTRAN is very well suited for numerical calculations, which is after all what is was made for.
Re:We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants (Score:2, Insightful)
talking about anachronisms
Re:RIP and thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FFS a person died... (Score:2, Insightful)
What's with the flaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
And for that matter, what IS 'constructive'? Maybe C++? And whatever that is, it wasn't influenced in any way by FORTRAN?
Just evolution, people... the TV scorning the radio as backward!?
Just to give people something to think aboout. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What do you know? (Score:5, Insightful)
Compared to more modern languages - by which I mean C - it's bad. There are plenty of things which drive me nuts - the need to define things a million times, the lack of any sane way to group variables.
But compared to what was around when it was made, it was a leap forward (assembly, anyone).
Also, lets not forget that it was made for... yes, that's right: punched cards! It has a maximum line width because of this (even if it's not on punched cards). This is, I think, one of the main reasons why FORTRAN encourages you to write code like it's in a big dense block (the lack of spaces, the inline looping of variables).
FORTRAN still has good use among physics labs, partly because there's a lot of physics-specific code that is made for it, and partly because everybody's already used to it. And it has been updated (F95) to include all the modern features you could want.
Still, you'd need to be mad to use it. Which is why I do.
Re:Be afraid, be very afraid (Score:3, Insightful)
We're also out of good original movie plots, song lyrics and lots of other stuff too. Has absolutely nothing to do with TFA or your comment, but I figured I'd mention it.
Give things a little more time and widen your sampling before feeling the doomsday of stagnate science is upon us. Developers will always develop what people demand, and right now they are demanding web 2.0 social networking web sites and other things that more 'serious' users would deem trivial and wasteful. By that token all development that goes into these trivial things could also be considered trivial.
I do agree that we'll hit a lull, and I'm also inclined to feel that which yields no productive lasting result is relatively useless (games, mindless surfing, etc).
About 15 years ago the whole world started to open up to everyone in it. We [humans] are a small world network [wikipedia.org] (as far as the definition goes), consider each person being a node and consider the need for them to begin trusting eachother for that network to be efficient and productive.
The fact that this trust is forming through the (technology wasting) we both bitch about is nothing less than amazing. We will get out of that 'lull' sooner or later
Relax, a little
Re:rest in peace (Score:5, Insightful)
95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.
It is easy to criticize, as many other posts have done, something invented half a century ago. Personally, I miss being able to use Fortran (or a procedural basic) to solve today's problems -- we've given ourselves over to the machine's favorite language (C) while we pat ourselves on the back for how smart we are now (as we create write-only code).
I wish this [cminusminus.org] had become more popular. There's still time.
FORTRAN greatest time save since assembler (Score:5, Insightful)
First there was machine language. You hand coded all the little ones and zeros manually to get your machine code. Then came assembler which was a great time saver with all its mnemonics, registers and loops.
The next step was a real higher-level language: FORTRAN. Its estimated, that this meant a time saving ratio for programmers of 10:1 against assembler. This rate of improvement was never reached again. All other improvements in programming are only incremental compared to that.Re:FFS a person died... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:rest in peace (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortran has been criticized because you can write "spaghetti code" or other crap, while other languages supposedly protect you from the mistakes you can make in Fortran. But you can write crappy code in any language (including "spaghetti classes"). I teach my students to write with good style. They know their code has to be clearly understandable not just to the machine but also to someone else who is familiar with the goal of the code but not the details. Trying to enforce good style through grammar is misguided at best, just as it is in writing in general. Developing good style is a personal, ongoing process for writing anything, including good code.
Re:FFS a person died... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
He lived to 82, I doubt there are any modern-day potato-ass programmers that could catch him even in his golden years. We should feel fortunate for his contributions and hope to hell we live that good of a life, that long. Now, where did I leave my Cheetos?
Re:rest in peace (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure there are millions of HTML hairdressers out there who don't know the first thing about real programming.
Re:Be afraid, be very afraid (Score:3, Insightful)
Naa. I'm sure back when car became widely available and used, some of the "elders" complained that now everybody is a "driver", and they don't even know the intrigate details of internal combustion.
Computer science is alive and well, there are merely two things happening that disorts the view:
- "Original" CS has been rolled back into math. You don't do computational heavy math without computers anymore, so why keep CS as a seperate field? Heavy computation is also interesting in lots of other fields, especially medicine and biology.
- "New" CS is a trade. Programmers, developers, project managers etc.
There's plenty of novel ideas and innovation out there. Look at SUNs Sparc T1, IBMs Power Cell (hardwarewise) and stuff lige virtualization (both machines (xen, vmware) and programs (java,
But if you believe that C++ was the height of evolution, well, then, yes, CS is dead.
Re:FFS a person died... (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't think that the number of people here making and/or understanding the jokes about FORTRAN says more about the significance of Backus's contributions than any fawning obituary column ever could? Contrary to another poster's comment, I think most death really is sad, but since I didn't know Mr Backus personally, I prefer to reflect on what he contributed to society as a whole instead of displaying false grief.
Re:FORTRAN greatest time save since assembler (Score:3, Insightful)
*) Ie: the integer type in FORTRAN or C isn't an integer in the mathematical sense, but a finite field. Addition of integers isn't real addition, but modulo addition. Division over integers isn't real division, its truncation.
**) In FORTRAN functions are primitives, while in Lisp functions are first-class values. Moreover, until FORTRAN 90 functions could not be recursive.