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John Backus

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This article is about the computer scientist. For the physicist, see John Backus (acoustician). For the minister, see John Chester Backus.

John Backus
Backus in December 1989
Born
John Warner Backus

(1924-12-03)December 3, 1924
Wilmington, Delaware
DiedMarch 17, 2007(2007-03-17) (aged 82)
Ashland, Oregon
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]

Early life[edit]

Backus was born in Philadelphia and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Delaware.[6] He studied at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, but he was apparently not a diligent student.[5] He entered college at the University of Virginia to study chemistry, but struggled with his classes there, and he was expelled after less than a year for poor attendance.[7] He was subsequently conscripted into the U.S. Army during World War II,[5] and eventually came to hold the rank of corporal, being put in command of an anti-aircraft battery stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.[7]

After receiving high scores on a military aptitude test, the Army sent him to study engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.[7] He later transferred to a pre-medical program at Haverford College.[8] During an internship at a hospital, he was diagnosed with a cranial bone tumor, which was successfully removed, and a plate was installed in his head. He then moved to the Flower and Fifth Avenue Medical School for medical school, but found it uninteresting and dropped out after nine months.[7] He soon underwent a second operation to replace the metal plate in his head with one of his own design,[9] and received an honorable medical discharge from the U.S. Army in 1946.[7]

Fortran[edit]

After moving to New York City he trained initially as a radio technician and became interested in mathematics. He graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 1949 and a master's degree in 1950, both in mathematics,[7][10] and joined IBM in 1950. During his first three years, he worked on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC); his first major project was to write a program to calculate positions of the Moon. In 1953, Backus developed the language Speedcoding, the first high-level language created for an IBM computer, to aid in software development for the IBM 701 computer.[11]

Programming was very difficult at this time, and in 1954 Backus assembled a team to define and develop Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. Fortran was the first high-level programming language to be put to broad use. This widely used language made computers practical and accessible machines for scientists and others without requiring them to have deep knowledge of the machinery.[12]

Backus–Naur form[edit]

Main article: Backus–Naur form

Backus served on the international committees that developed ALGOL 58 and the very influential ALGOL 60, which quickly became the de facto worldwide standard for publishing algorithms. Backus developed the Backus–Naur form (BNF), published in the UNESCO report on ALGOL 58. It was a formal notation able to describe any context-free programming language, and was important in the development of compilers. A few deviations from this approach were tried (notably in Lisp and APL), but by the 1970s, Backus–Naur context-free specifications for computer languages had become quite standard, following the development of automated compiler generators such as yacc.

This contribution helped Backus win the Turing Award in 1977.

Function-level programming[edit]

Backus later worked on a function-level programming language known as FP, which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?".[1] Sometimes viewed as Backus's apology for creating Fortran, this paper did less to garner interest in the FP language than to spark research into functional programming in general. When Backus publicized the function-level style of programming, his message was mostly misunderstood[13] as being the same as traditional functional programming style languages.

FP was strongly inspired by Kenneth E. Iverson's APL, even using a non-standard character set. An FP interpreter was distributed with the 4.2BSD Unix operating system, but there were relatively few implementations of the language, most of which were used for educational purposes.

Backus spent the latter part of his career developing FL (from "Function Level"), a successor to FP. FL was an internal IBM research project, and development of the language stopped when the project was finished. Only a few papers documenting it remain, and the source code of the compiler described in them was not made public. FL was at odds with functional programming languages being developed in the 1980s, most of which were based on the lambda calculus and static typing systems instead of, as in APL, the concatenation of primitive operations. Many of the language's ideas have now been implemented in versions of the J programming language, Iverson's successor to APL.

Awards and honors[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b 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. ^ Jump up to: a b "W. Wallace McDowell Award". Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b "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. ^ Jump up to: a b "ACM Turing Award Citation: John Backus". Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on February 4, 2007. Retrieved March 22, 2007.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b c Lohr, Steve (March 20, 2007). "John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved March 21, 2007.
  6. ^ "John Backus". The History of Computing Project. Archived from the original on April 27, 2016. Retrieved April 28, 2016.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f "John Backus - A.M. Turing Award Laureate". ACM A.M. Turing Award. Archived from the original on January 19, 2018. Retrieved May 4, 2018.
  8. ^ "Inventor of the Week Archive John Backus". Lemelson-MIT Program. February 2006. Archived from the original on October 26, 2011. Retrieved August 25, 2011.
  9. ^ Grady Booch (September 25, 2006). "Oral History of John Backus" (PDF). Retrieved August 17, 2009.
  10. ^ "John Backus". www.columbia.edu. Retrieved October 2, 2021.
  11. ^ Allen, F.E. (September 1981). "The History of Language Processor Technology in IBM". IBM Journal of Research and Development. 25 (5): 535–548. doi:10.1147/rd.255.0535.
  12. ^ "John Backus | Lemelson". lemelson.mit.edu. Retrieved February 7, 2023.
  13. ^ Hudak, Paul (1989). "Conception, Evolution, And Application Of Functional Programming Languages". ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 21, No. 3
  14. ^ "John Backus". IBM Archives. January 23, 2003. Archived from the original on August 26, 2011. Retrieved March 21, 2007.
  15. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 25, 2011. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
  16. ^ "John Backus". Archived from the original on May 14, 2008. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
  17. ^ "Recipients of the Charles Stark Draper Prize". Archived from the original on March 2, 2010. Retrieved March 26, 2007.
  18. ^ "Fellow Awards 1997 Recipient John Backus". Archived from the original on July 9, 2010. Retrieved April 15, 2008.

External links[edit]

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