Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors.
Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.
John Backus
John Backus | |
|---|---|
 Backus in December 1989 | |
| Born | John Warner Backus December 3, 1924 |
| Died | March 17, 2007 (aged 82) |
| Alma mater | University of Virginia University of Pittsburgh Haverford College Columbia University (B.S. 1949, M.S. 1950) |
| Known for | Speedcoding FORTRAN ALGOL Backus–Naur form Function-level programming |
| Spouses | Marjorie Jamison
(m. 1947–1966)Barbara Una
(m. 1968; died 2004) |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | National Medal of Science (1975) Turing Award (1977) Charles Stark Draper Prize (1993) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | IBM |
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]
- ^ 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.
- ^ "W. Wallace McDowell Award". Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
- ^ "The President's National Medal of Science: John Backus". National Science Foundation. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved March 21, 2007.
- ^ "ACM Turing Award Citation: John Backus". Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on February 4, 2007. Retrieved March 22, 2007.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
nytobitwas invoked but never defined (see the help page).
Previous Page Next Page
