Computing pioneer dies at age 82

The man who led the creation of Fortran, the first successful high-level computing language, John W. Backus, died Saturday at age 82. According to this obituary in the New York Times, Mr. Backus grew tired of "hand-to-hand combat with the machine" via assembly language, and convinced his superiors at IBM to let his team create a new language that communicated with the computer at a higher level of abstraction; i.e. closer to the process of human thinking. The first Fortran compiler was completed in 1957, a year before the word "software" had even been coined.

The Times added:

Fortran was also extremely efficient, running as fast as programs painstakingly hand-coded by the programming elite, who worked in arcane machine languages. This was a feat considered impossible before Fortran. It was achieved by the masterful design of the Fortran compiler, a program that captures the human intent of a program and recasts it in a way that a computer can process.

People who once programmed in Fortran are getting older, and many have moved onto other professions, like marketing.

Rest in peace, Mr. Backus.

innovation, software, programming languages, obituaries, New York Times