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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.
John Backus was a gifted problem-solver who created the first widely used, high-level programming language, Fortran, and developed the Backus-Naur Form for describing programming languages. He also worked on the IBM 704 and Speedcode, and received the National Medal of Science and the Turing Award.
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist and mathematician who led the team that designed FORTRAN (formula translation), the first important algorithmic language for computers. Restless as a young man, Backus found his niche in mathematics, earning a B.S. (1949) and an M.A. (1950) from.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
John Backus was a mathematician and computer scientist who created Fortran, one of the first high-level programming languages. He also invented the Backus-Naur Form, a notation for describing grammatical rules, and received the National Medal of Science and the Turing Award.
Mar 17, 2007 · John Backus was an American mathematician best known for the invention of FORTRAN and for the BNF notation for describing the syntax of a programming language. View five larger pictures. Biography. John Backus's parents were Cecil Franklin Backus (1885-1966) and Elizabeth Warner Edsall (1904-1933).
Mar 17, 2007 · John Backus was a pioneer of high-level programming languages, especially FORTRAN and BNF. He worked at IBM for most of his career and made significant contributions to functional programming and computer science.
John Backus, Fortran’s primary author, described the process as “hand-to-hand combat with the machine,” with the machine often winning. The cost of programmers was usually at least as great as the cost of the computers, and programmers spent up to half their time debugging.
