John W. Backus (1924 - 2007) 2007-03-20 08:25:25 - By: Dan
From Wikipeida: John W. Backus
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented the first high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it.
He received the 1977 ACM Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages."
I like this quote of his found in the New York Times Obituary about him:
"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "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."
He laid the foundation for what makes it possible for me to do what I do today.
Via Slashdot: John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN
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