I did a little FORTRAN programming before I was abducted by the BASIC cult. The two languages are very similar, and share a human-friendly face. They are heavily oriented toward Solving The Problem, and burden the user with very few computer-specific details which are not important for solving the problem. FORTRAN and BASIC opened digital computing to ordinary people who simply wished to solve problems, and ended the monopoly priesthood of mathematicians and computer scientists who kept computers all to themselves.
John W. Backus, leader of the 10-person IBM team which developed FORTRAN, died in March 2007. He is also renowned as the inventor of the Backus-Naur Form [with Danish computer scientist Peter Naur], a notation system which describes the grammatical structure not just of computer languages, but of human natural languages as well.
Backus and Naur's notation is also called the Panini-Backus Form, acknowledging original ideas of Panini, who wrote the comprehensive grammar of classical Sanskrit, probably in the 4th Century BCE. Almost nothing is known of Panini's life, but (Wikipedia):
According to legend, he was born in Shalatula, a town beside the Indus River, in Gandhara, which is in the modern day the Attock District of Pakistan's Punjab province, located between Rawalpindi and Peshawar.
Please enjoy these accounts of John W. Backus's very interesting life. He seems to have accidentally drifted into computer science because he wanted a good hi-fi system after he got out of the Army after World War II, and because hi-fi systems didn't exist, he had to enroll in school to learn to build one. That led to his interest in mathematics.
Note also the positive and constructive achievement and thought contained in these accounts. These are Americans -- even powerful American corporations -- at their best, using intellectual creativity to invent undreamed of things that help people and make the world better. These are achievements and an era to admire.
If it seems to differ from our present American moment, why? Why have we lost our interest in and emphasis on constructive ideas, inventions and achievements, and now seem so fixated -- both abroad and in our own cities -- on violence, force, imprisonment, waste, greed? When the world thinks of America at this moment, does it admire and take pleasure in our contributions and our culture?
Or do the people of the world look up at the sky and cringe in fear?
Are young Americans in sufficient numbers following in the spirit of people like John Backus and Lois Haibt, and are our corporations and institutions encouraging such creative people to make new, positive achievements?
Where are the dreamers wandering in search of machines which play beautiful music? Or is America's future in weapons design and electronic eavesdropping technology to keep us fairly safe from terrorist attacks? Is America's future growth industry our world's largest prison system? Is America's rising corporate star the Blackwater military mercenary force?
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School of Mathematics and Statistics
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
John Warner Backus
Born: 3 Dec 1924 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Died: 17 Mar 2007 in Ashland, Oregon, USA
John Backus spent his first years in Wilmington, Delaware and attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1942 although according to his own account he did not take his studies at Hill School too seriously:-
"I flunked out every year. I never studied. I hated studying. I was just goofing around. It had the delightful consequence that every year I went to summer school in New Hampshire where I spent the summer sailing and having a nice time."
He entered the University of Virginia to study chemistry at his father's request. However he was no more diligent than at school and in 1943 his studies were terminated. That year he joined the army.
In the army he took medical training, working in an Atlantic City hospital in a neurosurgery ward that treated head wounds. Strangely he was found to have a bone tumour and had a plate fitted in his head. A medical training seemed to be the right direction for Backus but after nine months of medical school he gave this up too:-
"I hated it. They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize - that's all they want you to do. You must not think."
Again without any idea which direction he should take, he took an apartment in New York. He describes what happened next:-
"I really did not know what the hell I wanted to do with my life. I decided that what I wanted was a good hi fi set because I liked music. In those days, they did not really exist so I went to a radio technicians' school. I had a very nice teacher - the first good teacher I ever had - and he asked me to cooperate with him and compute the characteristics of some circuits for a magazine.
"I remember doing relatively simple calculations to get a few points on a curve for an amplifier. It was laborious and tedious and horrible, but it got me interested in math. The fact that it had an application - that interested me."
Backus entered Columbia University, New York to study mathematics. He graduated in 1949. Just before he graduated he visited the IBM Computer Center on Madison Avenue. When he told the guide that he was looking for a job she told him to talk to a director.
"I said no, I could not. I looked sloppy and dishevelled. But she insisted and so I did. I took a test and did OK."
Backus joined IBM as a programmer in 1950. He is the inventor of FORTRAN, the first high level computer language to be developed. It became commercially available in 1957. Describing his early work on FORTRAN, Backus said:-
"We did not know what we wanted and how to do it. It just sort of grew. The first struggle was over what the language would look like. Then how to parse expressions - it was a big problem and what we did looks astonishingly clumsy now ...."
In 1959 he invented the Backus Naur Form (BNF), a standard notation to describe the syntax of a high level programming language.
His third major contribution to computer science was to develop a functional programming language called FP, which advocates a mathematical approach to programming.
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The New York Times
19 March 2007
John W. Backus, 82,
Fortran Developer, Dies
by Steve Lohr
John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82. His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age. Fortran, released in 1957, was "the turning point" in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.
Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.
Mr. Backus and his youthful team, then all in their 20s and 30s, devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. Fortran, short for Formula Translator, was very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work. With some training, they were no longer dependent on a programming priesthood to translate their science and engineering problems into a language a computer would understand. In an interview several years ago, Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that "95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran." He added: "It was a massive step."
Fortran was also extremely efficient, running as fast as programs painstakingly hand-coded by the programming elite, who worked in arcane machine languages. This was a feat considered impossible before Fortran. It was achieved by the masterful design of the Fortran compiler, a program that captures the human intent of a program and recasts it in a way that a computer can process.
In the Fortran project, Mr. Backus tackled two fundamental problems in computing -- how to make programming easier for humans, and how to structure the underlying code to make that possible. Mr. Backus continued to work on those challenges for much of his career, and he encouraged others as well.
"His contribution was immense, and it influenced the work of many, including me," Frances Allen, a retired research fellow at I.B.M., said yesterday.
Mr. Backus was a bit of a maverick even as a teenager. He grew up in an affluent family in Wilmington, Del., the son of a stockbroker. He had a complicated, difficult relationship with his family, and he was a wayward student.
In a series of interviews in 2000 and 2001 in San Francisco, where he lived at the time, Mr. Backus recalled that his family had sent him to an exclusive private high school, the Hill School in Pennsylvania.
"The delight of that place was all the rules you could break," he recalled.
After flunking out of the University of Virginia, Mr. Backus was drafted in 1943. But his scores on Army aptitude tests were so high that he was dispatched on government-financed programs to three universities, with his studies ranging from engineering to medicine.
After the war, Mr. Backus found his footing as a student at Columbia University and pursued an interest in mathematics, receiving his master's degree in 1950. Shortly before he graduated, Mr. Backus wandered by the I.B.M. headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display.
When a tour guide inquired, Mr. Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Mr. Backus described as math "brain teasers." It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score.
He was hired on the spot. As what? "As a programmer," Mr. Backus replied, shrugging. "That was the way it was done in those days."
Back then, there was no field of computer science, no courses or schools. The first written reference to "software" as a computer term, as something distinct from hardware, did not come until 1958.
In 1953, frustrated by his experience of "hand-to-hand combat with the machine," Mr. Backus was eager to somehow simplify programming. He wrote a brief note to his superior, asking to be allowed to head a research project with that goal. "I figured there had to be a better way," he said.
Mr. Backus got approval and began hiring, one by one, until the team reached 10. It was an eclectic bunch that included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College.
"They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills -- bridge players, chess players, even women," Lois Haibt, the Vassar graduate, recalled in an interview in 2000.
Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. "We were the hackers of those days," Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.
After Fortran, Mr. Backus developed, with Peter Naur, a Danish computer scientist, a notation for describing the structure of programming languages, much like grammar for natural languages. It became known as Backus-Naur form.
Later, Mr. Backus worked for years with a group at I.B.M. in an area called functional programming. The notion, Mr. Backus said, was to develop a system of programming that would focus more on describing the problem a person wanted the computer to solve and less on giving the computer step-by-step instructions.
"That field owes a lot to John Backus and his early efforts to promote it," said Alex Aiken, a former researcher at I.B.M. who is now a professor at Stanford University.
In addition to his daughter Karen, of New York, Mr. Backus is survived by another daughter, Paula Backus, of Ashland, Ore.; and a brother, Cecil Backus, of Easton, Maryland.
His second wife, Barbara Stannard, died in 2004. His first marriage, to Marjorie Jamison, ended in divorce.
It was Mr. Backus who set the tone for the Fortran team. Yet if the style was informal, the work was intense, a four-year venture with no guarantee of success and many small setbacks along the way.
Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.
"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."
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