01 · A life in computing
The person behind the work
John Backus led the IBM team that created FORTRAN, making high-level programming practical for scientific computation. The project combined a more accessible language with a compiler capable of producing efficient machine code. He also contributed to the formal description of programming-language syntax and later explored functional programming. His career showed how language design could change both everyday programming practice and the questions computer scientists ask.
The contribution, explained
John Backus led the development of FORTRAN at IBM. Scientific formulas and loops could be translated into efficient machine instructions, reducing the need to write assembly language for every calculation. His work also influenced the formal description of programming-language syntax through the notation associated with Backus and Peter Naur.
Why it matters
Practical high-level languages expanded who could program and how much work a programmer could express.