John Backus
John Warner Backus 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 also contributed to the design of ALGOL, and later researched the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"
Background
- Born in
- England
Trending & Selected Quotes
Trending topics shown first"For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesity; as a result, the study and invention of programming languages has lost much of its exci…"
"Well, that's a subject interested me a lot because I've seen so many young people in our culture today, that emphasizes the success all the time and is always pointing to this success of researchers a…"
"Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but the…"
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Timeline
1863
Born
Birth1937
Died
Death
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Information about John Backus is sourced from curated knowledge bases and cross-referenced for accuracy. Influence relationships are scored by thematic overlap and historical plausibility.
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