John Backus

John Backus was an American computer scientist who led the small IBM team that designed and implemented Fortran, released in 1957 and generally regarded as the first widely used high-level programming language, letting programmers write mathematical formulas directly rather than hand-coding low-level machine instructions. Backus also devised a formal notation for precisely describing the grammar of a programming language, which, after fellow computer scientist Peter Naur adapted it to specify the syntax of ALGOL 60, became known as Backus-Naur Form, a notation still widely used today to define the formal grammars of programming languages and data formats. Later in his career, at IBM Research, Backus became an advocate for function-level, or functional, programming, arguing in an influential 1977 Turing Award lecture titled Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style that conventional programming languages were unnecessarily tied to the low-level architecture of the computers running them, and proposing an alternative programming style built from combining whole functions rather than issuing sequential instructions. He received the Turing Award in 1977 for profound, influential and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems.