John Backus
American computer scientist (1924-2007) · United States · On the map · Academics · Died at 82
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.
John Backus is read about 125 times a day, in 53 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 6 November 2026
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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?"
