R.I.P. John Backus
John Backus, arguably the father of the programming language, has died. Nobody reading this blog today would be employed without his work. Amongst other things, he and his colleagues are responsible for:
- Fortran, the first popular, high-level programming language. It’s a language that a lot of people hate today, but was a huge improvement over manually encoding machine code when it was written
- The Backus-Naur Form grammars
- He was a strong advocate of functional programming since at least the 1970s.
Mark Chu-Carroll has a longer remembrance on his blog.