The New York Times is reporting that John W. Backus, the leader of the team that developed the Fortran programming language, died at age 82 in his home in Oregon on Saturday. Fortran is widely considered a giant leap forward on the software side of modern computing. It enabled computers and humans to communicate more easliy than ever before. Mr. Backus is survived by his daughters Karen and Paula Backus, and by his brother Cecil Backus.
Image credit - IBM
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies via CNET News.com
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
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This is the sort of thing that makes you think about how young the computer world truely is. This man designed one of the building blocks used in designing more user-friendly mathematical computation software. As we speed in to the future, we are beginning to lose the people who designed us the very building blocks we use to create virtually every program we use today. As it stands, we barely know who these people are, but our children's children will probably never consider that they existed.
Will they ever stop and wonder about the bold men who 'created the creators'?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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