The father of Fortran dies

 

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By Rene Millman

Posted on 20 Mar 2007 at 14:39

John Backus, the man who led the IBM team that created Fortran - the first widely-used computer language - has died. He was 82 and passed away at his home in Oregon.

In 1953, Backus proposed to IBM a more efficient alternative to assembly language for programming mainframe computers. The following year he got together a team to define and develop Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. While not the first high-level computer language, it was certainly considered by many to be the first to be widely used. In 1957 the first Fortran compiler was made available.

Backus said the development of Fortran was a constant process of trial, error and determination.

'You need the willingness to fail all the time,' he said of the project. 'You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.'

Backus went onto serve on committees developing the Algol language. He later worked on a functional programming language called FP, which focused more on describing a problem to a computer rather than giving it instructions to carry out. He spent the latter part of his career developing its successor FL.

He was named an IBM fellow in 1987 and in 1993 was awarded the Draper Prize. He retired in 1991. He is survived by two daughters and his brother.