John Backus

John Backus

John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"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 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".John Backus retired in 1991. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of John Backus has received more than 490,650 page views. His biography is available in 48 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 45 in 2019). John Backus is the 24th most popular computer scientist (down from 21st in 2019), the 1,697th most popular biography from United States (down from 1,606th in 2019) and the 15th most popular American Computer Scientist.