John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN 271
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."
Also known for... (Score:5, Informative)
Truly an American icon. Even if you never ran LEXX or YACC in your life, Backus's impact on contemporary culture cannot be denied.
We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants (Score:5, Informative)
Poke fun at Fortran all you want, but dammit I use code today to drive a statistical website that was written in the 60's, and it still runs great.
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/nde [ed.gov]
Re:Also known for... (Score:5, Informative)
BNF is a useful notation, but it is just a notation for context-free grammars, which had already been developed and whose properties were already understood. Chomsky described the Chomsky hierarchy of formal languages, including context-free languages (type 2), in 1956, three years before Backus introduced a primitive version of BNF in describing what became Algol 58. The basic ideas came from mathematical logic and linguistics. Backus' role was to introduce these ideas to the specification of computer languages, ironically in part in reaction to the problem of specifying Fortran, which is not context-free.
The mentioned Turing Award lecture (Score:5, Informative)
rest in peace (Score:5, Informative)
``apology'' (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, I'm pretty sure they do mean ``apology'' as in ``sorry, world''. Backus's work on FP was all about getting past the ``word-at-a-time'' assignment-based paradigm popularized by FORTRAN (the ``von Neumann bottleneck''), and moving on to more expressive algebraic programming techniques, today referred to as functional programming. Check out his Turing award lecture [stanford.edu] -- it's a great read!
Re:We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants (Score:5, Informative)
Personally I don't see why this man seems to be getting such a bad send off here. After all the man invented a programming language that at a time when their were few others around, a language that has survived in critical usage until today. There may be many geeks on this site, but I doubt many of those who seem to be dancing on his grave could have done something so difficult, anywhere near as well as he did.
Just because an old language is more difficult to use than some more modern ones, does not mean that old language is a bad thing to have existed. And it doesn't mean that it wasn't a great achievement.
Re:We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants (Score:3, Informative)
Funny, yes, but misinterpretation is not insight.
The code was developed in the 60's. It (the code) is used today to drive a statistical website.
Re:No need to apologise (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite:
Source: WordNet (r) 1.7
apology
n 1: an expression of regret at having caused trouble for someone; "he wrote a letter of apology to the hostess"
2: a formal written defense of something you believe in strongly [syn: apologia]
(this is another accepted meaning of a word, or an alternate meaning, as it is also known)
Yup, it's the same Chomsky (Score:5, Informative)
Check out the Wikipedia page on him. . . agree with his politics or not, he's had an interesting career in linguistics. . .
Re:...viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORT (Score:1, Informative)
LISP is a "centenial language" too (Score:4, Informative)
I call "centennial languages" languages that were invented near the beginning of the computer age as, still used a fair amount, and probably will be around until their 100th birthdays. Some languages like ALGOL, OL/I, and even PASCAL have faded.