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John Backus Dies
John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN, BNF, and winner of the 1977 Turing Award (read his lecture) has passed away at 82. I tell my CS330 students about Backus and the development of FORTRAN every semester when we discuss BNF (he’s the “B” in BNF). As I said when Ralph Griswold died a few months ago, Computer Science has always been a discipline where the founders were still around. That’s changing.
Posted by windley on March 21, 2007 10:13 AM
Comment from jeremy at March 21, 2007 2:26 PM
I still remember learning BNF in your 330 class. It was one of my early intellectual thrills as a budding computer scientist. It was one of those things you learn, and then you say "aha!", as you really get it.
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