John Backus: FORTRAN Creator and Pioneer | Generated by AI

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Question: Who was John Backus, the author of FORTRAN? Please provide a comprehensive introduction.

Answer:

John Backus (1924–2007): Father of FORTRAN

Early Life and Unlikely Academic Career

John Warner Backus was born on December 3, 1924, and died on March 17, 2007. He was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, raised in an affluent family that sent him to the prestigious Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Despite his privileged upbringing, Backus was far from a model student.

He entered the University of Virginia and majored in chemistry, but had a difficult time and was eventually expelled due to poor attendance after less than a year. He was then drafted into the US Army, where he commanded an antiaircraft battery at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

Due to excellent results on his military aptitude tests, Backus was directed to a premedical program at Haverford College. During his medical studies, he was diagnosed with a cranial bone tumor, which was surgically removed. He later attended the Flower and Fifth Avenue Medical School in New York City, but dropped out after nine months because, as he put it, “all you had to do was memorize stuff.”

Eventually, Backus found his niche in mathematics, earning a B.S. (1949) and an M.A. (1950) from Columbia University in New York City.

Joining IBM and Early Work

He joined the computer manufacturer IBM in 1950. Tired of laborious hand coding, he was granted permission to assemble a team at IBM that would work on improving efficiency.

The first problem he worked on was to write a program in machine code for the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) to calculate the position of the moon from a function given by a series expansion with about 1000 terms.

Backus invented a program he called Speedcoding to streamline programming. The program included a “scaling factor,” which allowed numbers of all sizes to be easily stored and manipulated.

Creating FORTRAN

Backus said that his interest in simplifying the programming experience came from his own laziness and boredom — he did not like the tedious work of assembly language.

IBM management accepted Backus’s proposal, and he eventually assembled a ten-person team that worked out of the IBM World Headquarters in Manhattan. The team was notably eclectic: it included a researcher from MIT, a cryptographer, a chess champion, and a young woman who had just graduated from Vassar. Long workdays were interrupted by snowball fights outside the offices.

In 1957, the IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System, or FORTRAN, debuted. It fundamentally changed the terms of communication between humans and computers. What was formerly a laborious task of manually keying in as many as a thousand program instructions for a given problem could now be translated, automated, and reduced to only 47 in FORTRAN.

FORTRAN changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. Backus and his youthful team devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra, very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work.

A revised and improved version, FORTRAN II, followed in 1958, adding user-defined subroutines that made procedural programming possible. By the start of the 1960s, FORTRAN had become popular enough that it was available for four different models of IBM computers.

The Backus–Naur Form (BNF)

After completing the FORTRAN system, Backus created the Backus–Naur Form (BNF), a standard notation that describes grammatical rules for high-level languages, in 1959. It is used in a number of programming languages today.

Along with Danish computer scientist Peter Naur, BNF formally defines the grammar of a language so that there is no ambiguity as to what is allowed and what is not. This notation became a cornerstone of compiler design and formal language theory.

ALGOL and Further Contributions

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.

Functional Programming and Later Career

Backus was also a pioneer in functional programming (FP), a system of programming that focuses more on describing the problem a person wants the computer to solve and less on giving the computer step-by-step instructions. Languages like Java and Python are increasingly adopting concepts derived from functional programming, and newer languages like Haskell are going completely functional.

Backus spent the latter part of his career developing FL (from “Function Level”), a successor to FP. It was an internal IBM research project, and many of the language’s innovative ideas have now been implemented in Iverson’s J programming language.

From early 1954 until his retirement from IBM in 1991, Backus served as manager of the Programming Research Department and later as an IBM Fellow at research facilities in Yorktown Heights, New York, and San Jose, California.

Awards and Recognition

The IEEE awarded Backus the W. W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 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.”

Asteroid 6830 Johnbackus was named in his honor on June 1, 2007.

Death and Legacy

Backus retired from IBM in 1991. Barbara, his second wife, died in 2004, whereupon Backus moved to Ashland, Oregon, to live near his daughter Paula. Backus died on March 17, 2007, in Ashland.

His legacy is immense. FORTRAN is the language used today for comparing the performance of high-end supercomputers, and it remains one of the most enduring programming languages in scientific and engineering history. As Backus himself once said: “You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.”

Summary Table

Attribute Detail
Full Name John Warner Backus
Born December 3, 1924, Philadelphia, PA
Died March 17, 2007, Ashland, OR
Employer IBM (1950–1991)
Major Creation FORTRAN (1957)
Other Contributions BNF notation, ALGOL, Functional Programming (FP/FL)
Key Awards ACM Turing Award (1977), National Medal of Science (1975)

References:

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