John Backus
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- Fortran, Backus-Naur form
- Awards
- Turing Award 1977
Led the Fortran project and thereby proved a compiler could produce code good enough — which nobody believed in 1954.
The objection to high-level languages was performance: hand-written assembly was assumed always to win. Backus's team at IBM therefore spent as much effort on optimisation as on the language, and the finished 1957 compiler produced code close to hand-written quality. That settled the question and let programming's level of abstraction rise.
He also introduced the grammar notation that, with Peter Naur's adjustments, became Backus-Naur form, still the standard for describing language syntax. In his 1977 Turing lecture he turned against his own legacy and argued for functional programming, asking whether programming could be liberated from the von Neumann style.