John Backus - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17704662/
Wow - I did some of my first programming in college in Fortran…
Pretty flipping amazing to think how far computers and programming have come in that man’s lifetime…
END PROGRAM John Backus
!He will be missed
That and the fact that, despite all that progress, billions of lines of FORTRAN are still being run everyday.
I guess I’ll have to dig up a stack of cards and chuck them on the floor in rememberance tonight.
We’re coming up on the end of an era here. With Backus gone, how many of the early giants of computing are left?
The link mentions BNF only at the very end. I suspect many computer scientists have used more BNF than Fortran, certainly I have.
Think it depends on one’s age, Voyager. I used many Fortran programs while at Uni; out in the Real World [sup]TM[/sup] I wrote several little data manipulation programs with Fortran. One of my favorite computer languages evah.
RIP Mr. Backus. And thanks 
.
Sniff, sniff… 
Fortran is the first programming language I learned. Anybody out there remember Watfor and Watfiv?
May you rest in peace…
It was the first higher level language I learned, in high school. I was in grad school when SigPLAN notices had a new language or two in each issue, and I designed a language for my dissertation, so I was quite the BNF maven back then.
The Times obit had a great story, which expanded on the one in the link. Backus flunked out of college, and when he got drafted he scored so high on his intelligence test that the Army sent him to college. He finally got an MS in Math from Columbia. IBM had an early computer on display, and he wandered into a tour. When he told someone there that he was a mathematician, they dragged him upstairs, gave him a test, and hired him on the spot. He said that was how they hired programmers in those days.
It also said that when he was running the group designing Fortran he didn’t think the IBM performance review system worked for his group, so he ignored it.
A ways back there was a conference on the history of programming languages put on by Sigplan and the SIG on history. There was a great paper on the history of Fortran there - I forget if it was by Backus.
He’ll be missed. I started out in Fortran (using cards). I still maintain some ancient Fortran code today (not much, but there’s never been a good enough reason to rewrite it).
I read a CNET article about his passing.
I always kind of liked Fortran, not that I remember much of it. No version I ever used was great for large scale, multi-programmer development, but I always liked putting things together in it.