John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.
Before Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine.
Fortran was a "high-level" language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Mr. Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979.
"I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs," he said.
The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced by a factor of 20 the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine.
Before Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine.
Fortran was a "high-level" language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Mr. Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979.
"I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs," he said.
The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced by a factor of 20 the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine.
John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.
Before Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine.
Fortran was a "high-level" language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Mr. Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979.
"I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs," he said.
The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced by a factor of 20 the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine.
Before Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine.
Fortran was a "high-level" language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Mr. Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979.
"I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs," he said.
The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced by a factor of 20 the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine.
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