John Backus

His schooling would not take. He was at The Hill School in Pottstown and, by the record, not a diligent student, then went to the University of Virginia to study chemistry and was expelled inside a year for not turning up. The Army drafted him, made him a corporal, and sent him first to Pittsburgh for engineering and then to Haverford for premedical work. During a hospital internship, doctors found a bone tumor in his skull. They installed a metal plate, and Backus went back for a second operation to replace it with a plate he had designed himself. He took an honorable medical discharge in 1946, enrolled at Columbia, and came out with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1949 and a master's the year after.

He joined IBM in 1950 and spent three years on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, where his first serious assignment was a program to compute the position of the Moon. Speedcoding followed in 1953, the first high-level language built for an IBM machine. Late that year he proposed something much larger: a system that would take algebra written the way mathematicians write it and turn it into machine code good enough that programmers would stop hand-coding. A draft specification was finished by November 1954, the first manual appeared in October 1956, and the compiler was delivered in April 1957. Fortran was the first high-level language to be taken up broadly, and it is still in service. Backus then devised the notation now called Backus-Naur Form, which gave programming languages a precise way to state their own grammar.

The man who made high-level programming practical spent the second half of his career saying it had been done wrong. His 1977 Turing Award lecture asked whether programming could be liberated from the von Neumann style, and the answer was an attack on conventional languages, his own included, as bloated things shaped by the wiring of the machine rather than by mathematics. He proposed replacing them with function-level programming, built FP and then FL to demonstrate it, and worked at it inside IBM until he retired in 1991. Almost nobody followed. The lecture is among the most cited papers in computing and among the least acted on, and Fortran, which he had come to treat as part of the problem, outlasted the alternative by decades.

He retired in 1991 and died at his home in Ashland, Oregon, on March 17, 2007, at 82. An asteroid, 6830 Johnbackus, was named for him that year. The honors had come steadily enough — IBM Fellow in 1963, the National Medal of Science in 1975, the Turing Award in 1977, the Draper Prize in 1993 — but the durable monument is the language. Fortran is roughly 70 years old and still compiles: weather models, fluid dynamics, and a great deal of the numerical machinery underneath modern physics. His functional languages are studied. His compiler is used.

John Backus's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Speedcoding invention
  The first high-level language written for an IBM computer 1953
• Fortran invention
  Specified by November 1954, manual October 1956, compiler delivered April 1957 1957
• Backus-Naur Form invention
  The grammar notation published in the ALGOL 58 report and refined by Peter Naur 1959
• Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? article
  The Turing Award lecture, and a repudiation of the languages he had made possible 1978
• FP invention
  Function-level programming, proposed as the replacement. It did not take. 1977
• FL invention
  The successor language, developed at IBM Almaden 1989

• 1943 aged ~19 Expelled from the University of Virginia inside a year for poor attendance
• 1946 aged ~22 Discharged from the Army with a metal plate in his skull he helped design A bone tumor was found during a hospital internship. He had a second operation to fit his own version.
• 1949 aged ~25 Takes a mathematics degree at Columbia
• 1950 aged ~26 Joins IBM and is put on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator His first major task was a program to compute the position of the Moon.
• November 1954 aged 29 The draft specification for the Fortran system is finished
• April 1957 aged 32 The first Fortran compiler is delivered for the IBM 704
• 1959 aged ~35 Publishes the notation that becomes Backus-Naur Form
• 1977 aged ~53 Uses the Turing Award lecture to attack the languages he helped create
• March 17, 2007 aged 82 Dies at home in Ashland, Oregon

• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. compiler predecessor
• John von Neumann 1903–1957
  Hungarian-American mathematician and engineer whose computer architecture remains the basis of modern computing. the style he attacked
• Donald Knuth b. 1938
  Wrote The Art of Computer Programming and created the TeX typesetting system. built on his notation
• Dennis Ritchie 1941–2011
  Created the C programming language and co-developed Unix at Bell Labs. later language designer
• Ken Thompson b. 1943
  Co-created Unix at Bell Labs and later co-designed the Go programming language. later language designer
• Herman Hollerith 1860–1929
  Invented punched-card tabulating machines used in the 1890 census and founded a corporate predecessor of IBM. built the punched-card machinery IBM grew from