John backus

John Backus (Philadelphia, December 3, 1924 - Oregon, March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist.

Winner of the Turing Award in 1977 for his work on high-level programming systems, especially for his work on the development of FORTRAN.

To avoid the programming difficulties of the calculators of his time, in 1954 Backus was in charge of directing a research project at IBM for the project and realization of a programming language closer to normal mathematical notation. From this project emerged the FORTRAN language, the first of the high-level programming languages that had a great impact, even commercial, in the emerging computing community. Despite the time that has passed and that FORTRAN has lost a lot of relevance, it is still used by many companies and research centers.

After the completion of FORTRAN, Backus was a very active member of the international committee that was in charge of the ALGOL language project. In this context he proposed a notation for the representation of the grammars used in the definition of a programming language (the so-called context-free grammars). Such a notation is known as the Backus-Naur Notation (Backus-Naur Form or BNF) and links Backus's name to that of Peter Naur, a European computer scientist from the ALGOL committee who contributed to its definition.

In the 1970s, Backus was primarily interested in Functional Programming, and developed the FP programming language, described in his Turing Award-winning text, "Can Programming be Liberated from the Von Neumann Style?" It is a fundamentally academic language, which nevertheless encouraged a large number of investigations. The FP project, which became FL, was terminated when Backus retired from IBM in 1991.

John Backus passed away on Saturday, March 17, 2007, at the age of 82 at his home in Ashland, Oregon of natural causes, according to a statement from his family.