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John Backus

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Warner Backus
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(born Dec. 3, 1924, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.) U.S. mathematician. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University. He was head of a small group that in 1957 developed the computer language FORTRAN for numerical analysis. He contributed to the development of ALGOL and developed a notation known as the Backus Normal, or Backus-Naur, Form for defining the syntax of a programmable language (1959). He received the Turing Award in 1977.

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Scientist: John Backus
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American computer scientist (1924–)

Backus was born in Philadelphia. After graduating from Columbia University, New York, he joined the staff of IBM in 1952 and remained with them until his retirement in 1991. From 1959 until 1963 he worked at the IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, and thereafter as an IBM Fellow at the IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, California.

Backus has reported on the state of programming when he joined IBM. It was, he noted, “a black art, a private arcane matter.” All programming was done using machine or assembly language. There were no compilers, no index registers, and the programmer spent most of his time debugging the program and feeding it into the computer. The programmers actually cost more than the computer. Backus commented, “They dismissed as foolish plans to make programming accessible to a larger population,” it was inconceivable “that any mechanical process could possibly perform the mysterious feats of invention required to write an efficient program.”

In 1954 Backus led an IBM team determined to free computer programming from the professional élite. As the speed of computers increased it made no sense to have them standing idle while a programmer struggled to operate them. The problem was made more pressing by the development of the new and more powerful IBM 704. By late 1954 some of the main details of the high level language FORTRAN (from Formula Translation) had been established. Backus defined his aim as “to design a language which would make it possible for engineers and scientists to write programs for the 704.” The language itself was available in 1957 and soon became the most widely used programming language.

Wikipedia: John Backus
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For the physicist, see John Backus (acoustician)

John Backus

Born December 3, 1924(1924-12-03)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died March 17, 2007 (aged 82)
Ashland, Oregon
Fields Computer Science
Institutions IBM
Known for Speedcoding
FORTRAN
ALGOL
Backus-Naur form
Function-level programming
Notable awards ACM Turing Award
Draper Prize

John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the 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.

The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.[1] He received the National Medal of Science in 1975,[2] and 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 publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages.”[3]

Contents

Life and career

Backus was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. He studied at the The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and was apparently not a diligent student.[4] After entering the University of Virginia to study chemistry, he quit and was conscripted into the U.S. Army.[4] He began medical training and, during an internship at a hospital, he was diagnosed with a cranial bone tumor, which was removed successfully; a plate was installed in his head, and he ended medical training after nine months and a subsequent operation to replace the plate with one of his own design.[5]

After moving to New York City he trained initially as a radio technician and became interested in mathematics. He graduated from Columbia University with a Master's degree in mathematics during 1949, and joined IBM in 1950. During his first three years, he worked on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC); his first major project was to write a program to calculate positions of the Moon. During 1953, John Backus also developed the language Speedcoding, the first higher-order language created for an IBM computer.[6]

Programming was very difficult, and during 1954 Backus assembled a team to define and develop Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. Fortran was the first high level programming language to be put to broad use.

Backus made another, critical contribution to early computer science: during the latter part of the 1950s Backus served on the international committees which developed ALGOL 58 and the very influential ALGOL 60, which quickly became the de facto worldwide standard for publishing algorithms. Backus developed the Backus-Naur Form (BNF), in the UNESCO report on ALGOL 58. This was a formal notation with which one could describe any context-free programming language and was important in the development of compilers. This contribution helped Backus win the Turing Award.

He later worked on a "function-level" programming language known as FP which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?". Sometimes viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN, this paper did less to garner interest in the FP language than to spark research into functional programming in general. An FP interpreter was distributed with the 4.2BSD Unix operating system. FP was strongly inspired by Kenneth E. Iverson’s APL, even using a non-standard character set. Backus spent the latter part of his career developing FL (from "Function Level"), a successor to FP. FL was an internal IBM research project, and development of the language essentially stopped when the project was finished (only a few papers documenting it remain), but many of the language's innovative, arguably important ideas have now been implemented in Iverson’s J programming language.

Backus was named an IBM Fellow in 1963,[7] and was awarded a degree honoris causa from the University Henri Poincaré in Nancy (France) in 1989[8] and a Draper Prize in 1993.[9] He retired in 1991 and died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17, 2007.[4]

Awards and honors

References

  1. ^ a b "W. Wallace McDowell Award". http://www.computer.org/portal/site/ieeecs/menuitem.c5efb9b8ade9096b8a9ca0108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=ieeecs_level1&path=ieeecs/about/awards&file=WallaceMcD_recipients.xml&xsl=generic.xsl&. Retrieved 2008-04-15. 
  2. ^ a b "The President's National Medal of Science: John Backus". National Science Foundation. http://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/recip_details.cfm?recip_id=25. Retrieved 2007-03-21. 
  3. ^ a b "ACM Turing Award Citation: John Backus". Association for Computing Machinery. http://www.acm.org/awards/turing_citations/backus.html. Retrieved 2007-03-22. 
  4. ^ a b c Lohr, Steve (2007-03-20). "John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/business/20backus.html. Retrieved 2007-03-21. 
  5. ^ Grady Booch (interviewer) (2006-09-25). "Oral History of John Backus" (pdf). http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Backus_John/Backus_John_1.oral_history.2006.102657970.pdf. Retrieved 2009-08-17. 
  6. ^ Allen, F.E.. "The History of Language Processor Technology in IBM". IBM Journal of Research Development 25 (5, September 1981). 
  7. ^ a b "John Backus". IBM Archives. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_backus.html. Retrieved 2007-03-21. 
  8. ^ a b "John Backus". http://www.thocp.net/biographies/backus_john.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-15. 
  9. ^ a b "Recipients of the Charles Stark Draper Prize". http://www.nae.edu/nae/awardscom.nsf/weblinks/NAEW-4NHMN6?OpenDocument. Retrieved 2007-03-26. 
  10. ^ "Fellow Awards 1997 Recipient John Backus". http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/index.php?id=70. Retrieved 2008-04-15. 

External links

v • d • e
A. M. Turing Award laureates

Alan Perlis (1966) · Maurice Vincent Wilkes (1967) · Richard Hamming (1968) · Marvin Minsky (1969) · James H. Wilkinson (1970) · John McCarthy (1971) · Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972) · Charles Bachman (1973) · Donald Knuth (1974) · Allen Newell / Herbert Simon (1975) · Michael O. Rabin / Dana Scott (1976) · John Backus (1977) · Robert Floyd (1978) · Kenneth E. Iverson (1979) · C. A. R. Hoare (1980) · Edgar F. Codd (1981) · Stephen Cook (1982) · Ken Thompson / Dennis Ritchie (1983) · Niklaus Wirth (1984) · Richard Karp (1985) · John Hopcroft / Robert Tarjan (1986) · John Cocke (1987) · Ivan Sutherland (1988) · William Kahan (1989) · Fernando J. Corbató (1990) · Robin Milner (1991) · Butler Lampson (1992) · Juris Hartmanis / Richard Stearns (1993) · Edward Feigenbaum / Raj Reddy (1994) · Manuel Blum (1995) · Amir Pnueli (1996) · Douglas Engelbart (1997) · Jim Gray (1998) · Fred Brooks (1999) · Andrew Yao (2000) · Ole-Johan Dahl / Kristen Nygaard (2001) · Ron Rivest / Adi Shamir / Leonard Adleman (2002) · Alan Kay (2003) · Vint Cerf / Bob Kahn (2004) · Peter Naur (2005) · Frances E. Allen (2006) · Edmund M. Clarke / E. Allen Emerson / Joseph Sifakis (2007) · Barbara Liskov (2008)
v • d • e
National Medal of Science laureates
 
Mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s

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