BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies

Subject: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: beardedbruce
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 03:36 PM

Computing pioneer John Backus dies
POSTED: 1:27 p.m. EDT, March 20, 2007

Story Highlights• Computer pioneer John Backus dead at 82
• Backus developed the Fortran programming language
• Fortran remains in use today

(AP) -- John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.

Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Oregon, according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career.

Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine.

Fortran was a "high-level" programming language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.

The breakthrough earned Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry's highest accolades. The citation praised Backus' "profound, influential, and lasting contributions."

Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.

"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."

John Warner Backus was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1924. His father was a chemist who became a stockbroker. Backus had what he would later describe as a "checkered educational career" in prep school and the University of Virginia, which he left after six months. After being drafted into the Army, Backus studied medicine but dropped it when he found radio engineering more compelling.

Backus finally found his calling in math, and he pursued a master's degree at Columbia University in New York. Shortly before graduating, Backus toured the IBM offices in midtown Manhattan and came across the company's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, an early computer stuffed with 13,000 vacuum tubes.

Backus met one of the machine's inventors, Rex Seeber -- who "gave me a little homemade test and hired me on the spot," Backus recalled in 1979.

Backus' early work at IBM included computing lunar positions on the balky, bulky computers that were state of the art in the 1950s. But he tired of hand-coding the hardware, and in 1954 he got his bosses to let him assemble a team that could design an easier system.

The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20.

It showed skeptics that machines could run just as efficiently without hand-coding. A wide range of programming languages and software approaches proliferated, although Fortran also evolved over the years and remains in use.

Backus remained with IBM until his retirement in 1991. Among his other important contributions was a method for describing the particular grammar of computer languages. The system is known as Backus-Naur Form.

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: beardedbruce
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 03:54 PM

And before anyone else comments, Yes, I DO know it is Fortran, not FORTRAN. Consider the thread title to be emphasis.

8-{E
Fortran Programmer since 1974

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: DMcG
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 03:57 PM

Ah, but it was FORTRAN when Backus developed it!

(From a FORTRAN programmer since FORTRAN IID - FORTRAN II with extensions for those new-fangled disk thingies - they'll never catch on)

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: beardedbruce
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 04:17 PM

Only because they only used upper case!


8-{E

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Jean(eanjay)
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 04:22 PM

I remember using Fortran in the seventies. It has been interesting reading the information you have posted.

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Rowan
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 05:15 PM

Ditto, eanjay,
I think that's where I earned my reputation as a pedant. I hope he has entertaining conversations with Ada, Babbage and Turing.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Scrump
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 05:19 PM

Wow, FORTRAN IV was the first computer language I ever learned. Seems a long time ago now - well, it was.

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Bunnahabhain
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 06:17 PM

Does the fact I was taught on Fortran 90 date me at all?

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Rowan
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 07:13 PM

Probably. bunna, but learning on WATFOR might be even 'worse'.

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Peace
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 07:26 PM

Fortran, language

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Peace
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 07:27 PM

Sorry.

How is it different from other machine languages?

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: HuwG
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 07:49 PM

Thanks for the thread.

From one who learned Fortran 66 - (but I'm showing off here, I actually learned it in 1983).

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: GUEST,petr
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 08:04 PM

its old. its really the first high level language.

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Peace
Date: 20 Mar 07 - 08:07 PM

Thank you.

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: gnu
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 05:18 AM

So, he's gone to that perpetual do loop in the sky? I can hear that f***in bell!

Fortran IV with Wotbol V, me. (did I get that right? Wotbol V?)

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 05:59 AM

Peace, a machine language is the direct, machine-specific set of available instructions, properly represented in binary or hexadecimal code. It's sometimes confused with "assembler", or 1st generation programming language (though this term was coined later, and has rarely been used), which is one step further removed from the machine, in that it is represented by acronyms or short letter-based words (MOV for "move", for example), yet it has a near-one-to-one relationship with the machine code it represents; and thus it is also machine-specific.

Fortran belongs to the 2nd generation programming languages (in fact the first languages to be called that), which are even further removed from the machines; for a start, they are machine-code-independent, though not machine architecture-independent (i.e. you needed to know the available hardware components of the computer, how many disks or tape drives and of what capacity, what type of printer etc).

3rd generation languages were also machine architecture-independent, while 4th gen languages were also data architecture independent; and thus we come to object-oriented programming and today's programming tools.

Fortran (II) was the first computer language I learned, in 1971, before I went to uni, and I enjoyed using it so much that it was instrumental in my decision 2 years later to abandon Chemical Engineering for Computer Science (as it was then called). I used it for a number of years; I did one of my two degree projects in it. Even more important, I used Backus-Naur Form for my Masters thesis, designing a compiler (a translator of programming languages into machine code).

With 34 years in IT (studying and working), and a good career in the profession, I have much to be grateful to John Backus for. God rest his soul.

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Rapparee
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 07:42 AM

Amen, George. Amen.

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 07:56 AM

I started some time in early 7Os with COBOL ..... picked up FORTRAN later on - then it all went downhill from there - back in 79, or there abouts, I was President of the Uni of Qld Computing Club - and several fools started a challenge to learn (to be able to explain how the language worked, read the code and explain what was happening, and do simple coding!) as many languages as possible - the others gave up when I had at least one for almost every letter of the alphabet... So many - including lots of 'assemblers' etc, that I started to organise the languages by the 'type' - eg object oriented, assembler, list processing (LISP), data query (SQL, etc), high level descriptinv (B-NF),simulation (Simula), and that cool thing that the astronomer made up... :-)

Fortunately time has healed much, and I have forgotten most of all that nonsense.... :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Mr Red
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 08:08 AM

Old computer language inventors never die they just

GOTO HELL

Oh I remember FORTRAN and that's how we wrote it. Pretty sure it was "ver IV", Caius Julius Ceaser was on the throne then. '68 if my memory ....
(16K of core -recently upgraded from 4K! and you were proud of it too- try telling that to young people today - and they'll just laugh) -
........ serves me

As I remember it was pretty frustrating - coding on sheets, having it punched on tape waiting a week for the results because "Data Processing Dept" (no IT then) had priority.

Oh the memories.......

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 08:13 AM

"Much of my work has come from being lazy"

Funnily enough... that seems to have been sorta my motto too... most of what I achieve is by being lazy in the traditional sense, so I try doing something a little different...

I was told that the right sort of 'lazy' is an indicator of intelligence, only the dumb keep doing things the same way without changing... "If it isn't working, try do anything else! ^*"

^* after doing that, you'll either be better off or worse, off, or no different... the intelligent can surely take it from there! :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: GUEST,Martin Ryan
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 09:47 AM

As an undergraduate in the mid 1960's, I had to choose between taking a course in technical German - or Fortran. I picked the less complext of the two!

Regards

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: GUEST,Martin Ryan
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 09:49 AM

... and should have stuck to English, judging by that typo!

Subject: RE: BS: Developer of FORTRAN dies
From: Peace
Date: 21 Mar 07 - 09:55 AM

George, many thanks.