John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN

A number of readers let us know of the passing of John W. Backus, who assembled a team to develop FORTRAN at IBM in the 1950s. It was the first widely used high-level language. Backus later worked on a "function-level" programming language, FP, which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" and is viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN. He received the 1977 ACM Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages."

Wow.

FTA:

His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age.

Psh, he developed FORTRAN. I'm surprised he even lived to 82 without being killed by a rabid programmer. ;)

Re:Wow.

I am inclined to blame him for Basic as well, because it started out as a kind of simplified Fortran.

I'm more inclined to thank him for all the other high level programming languages.

Re:Wow.

I'm even more inclined to thank him for playing both Mr. Howell and Mr. Magoo.

Re:Wow.

I am inclined to blame him for Basic as well, because it started out as a kind of simplified Fortran.

FORTRAN was the first working high level compiler language; BASIC was the first working interpreter language. Very different underlying structures.

Now COBOL was the second major high level compiler language, and it was very much a reaction to FORTRAN, so I suppose using parent post's logic, we can blame Backus for COBOL. But then that cheapens the contributions of the Girl Admiral (Grace Hopper) who gave us such wonders as the nanosecond wire, and MULTIPLY 2 BY 2 GIVING FOUR.

For the youngsters out there:

1. FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was the break-through from machine language and assembly to a higher level language with a compiler. Everything we do now is based on this; I believe that many mission critical engineering libraries are still in Fortran (they were a few years ago)
2. COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language, Compiles Only By Odd Luck) was the second successful high level language. Its major improvement over Fortran was getting rid of triphasic logic (branch on <0, or =0, or >0) in favor of boolean logic (branch on !0 or 0). Its most noteworthy failing was the requirement to use the period punctuation mark (full stop) to end sections. This was particularly a problem for girl programmers, since at the time getting into trouble because you missed a period had serious consequences. Cobol simply put too much emphasis on a nearly invisible and easily missed period.
3. BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) made two big advances: first, it attempted to span both engineering and business computing (doing each with the same degree of imprecision); second and more important, it introduced the concept of using an interpreter rather than a compiler. Good stuff, that. Yet another baby step toward tomorrow's virtual machines. Most noteworthy program ever written in Basic: Eliza. Most significant long term contribution: the reaction to its spaghetti coding style, from which Pascal and modern procedure based programming arose.

</drivel>

It is hard for some of us graybeards to poke fun at Backus. His vision was the inspiration that has taken us all down this road.

LISP is a "centenial language" too

LISP is about to enter its sixth decade too, is still used by advocates, and had its heyday in computer culture. I believe its inventor John McCarthy is still around. MIT used to use LISP as its required CS training language from the 1960s until 2006.

I call "centennial languages" languages that were invented near the beginning of the computer age as, still used a fair amount, and probably will be around until their 100th birthdays. Some languages like ALGOL, OL/I, and even PASCAL have faded.

Re:What do you know?

I do, in fact my main project is not only in FORTRAN but in standards compliant fixed form FORTRAN 77, huzzah!

Compared to more modern languages - by which I mean C - it's bad. There are plenty of things which drive me nuts - the need to define things a million times, the lack of any sane way to group variables.

But compared to what was around when it was made, it was a leap forward (assembly, anyone).

Also, lets not forget that it was made for... yes, that's right: punched cards! It has a maximum line width because of this (even if it's not on punched cards). This is, I think, one of the main reasons why FORTRAN encourages you to write code like it's in a big dense block (the lack of spaces, the inline looping of variables).

FORTRAN still has good use among physics labs, partly because there's a lot of physics-specific code that is made for it, and partly because everybody's already used to it. And it has been updated (F95) to include all the modern features you could want.

Still, you'd need to be mad to use it. Which is why I do.

Also known for...

... Backus-Naur Form (BNF) grammars, the sine qua non of compiler design for the most-popular languages out there.

Truly an American icon. Even if you never ran LEXX or YACC in your life, Backus's impact on contemporary culture cannot be denied.

Re:Also known for...

Truly an American icon. Even if you never ran LEXX or YACC in your life, Backus's impact on contemporary culture cannot be denied.

Many times I have edited lex and yacc code, but never have I understood what the hell I was doing.

Re:Also known for...

Many times I have edited lex and yacc code, but never have I understood what the hell I was doing.

Well fear not. I think far fewer programmers today are familiar with BNF than back in the day when anyone who was not utterly worthless had a dog eared copy of The Unix Programming Environment. This means the end of all those tersely documented syntaxes, and with them those cryptic yacc scripts.

Modern system designers have taken a clean sheet approach to the problem of grammar, one which escapes the limits of technology in Backus' generation, when computing power was scarce relative to brain power. Today you are much more likely to be called upon to work with XML schemas, which follows a simple easily understood philosophy: if something is worth saying, then it is worth saying with a lot words.

Re:Also known for...

if something is worth saying, then it is worth saying with a lot words.

I like the corollary more: "XML is like violence. If it's not working, you're not using enough of it."

Re:Also known for...

BNF is a useful notation, but it is just a notation for context-free grammars, which had already been developed and whose properties were already understood. Chomsky described the Chomsky hierarchy of formal languages, including context-free languages (type 2), in 1956, three years before Backus introduced a primitive version of BNF in describing what became Algol 58. The basic ideas came from mathematical logic and linguistics. Backus' role was to introduce these ideas to the specification of computer languages, ironically in part in reaction to the problem of specifying Fortran, which is not context-free.

Yup, it's the same Chomsky

In case you were wondering, the Chomsky of the "hierarchy of formal languages" is the same Noam Chomsky that you probably know of in a political context.

Check out the Wikipedia page on him. . . agree with his politics or not, he's had an interesting career in linguistics. . .

Worst headline ever

John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN

This has to be the worst Slashdot headline ever. Makes FORTRAN sound like a type of cancer or something. (I thought that stuff was more of COBOL's league.)

So he developed FORTRAN as he died, huh?

What does that entail? Did he hemorrhage "WRITE (6,7) 7 FORMAT(12H GOD DAMN IT)" and flatline? What about his death rattle? "STOP END"?

We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants

If it were not for the work of that generation, and the creativity they displayed, our world would be a far different place.

Poke fun at Fortran all you want, but dammit I use code today to drive a statistical website that was written in the 60's, and it still runs great.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/nde [ed.gov]

Re:We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants

2060s dude, he's a time traveler. Although you don't want to know the cataclysm that forces future programmers to write in FORTRAN *shudder*

Re:We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants

To heck with just statistics. Fortran is alive and well at the heart of some major airline reservations, checkin and cargo systems. yes, they tried to move to newer technologies but they couldn't handel the load, particularly at points when there is a lot of rescheduling such as during bad weather.

Re:We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants

Speaking of bad weather, I think these guys - http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ [metoffice.gov.uk] who are the authority on weather prediction in the UK. Use Fortran for weather forecasting and climate prediction http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical /fortran90/index.html [metoffice.gov.uk] and they don't seem to be tiring of it.

Personally I don't see why this man seems to be getting such a bad send off here. After all the man invented a programming language that at a time when their were few others around, a language that has survived in critical usage until today. There may be many geeks on this site, but I doubt many of those who seem to be dancing on his grave could have done something so difficult, anywhere near as well as he did.

Just because an old language is more difficult to use than some more modern ones, does not mean that old language is a bad thing to have existed. And it doesn't mean that it wasn't a great achievement.

The Tombstone

GOTO END or , for those that believe in reincarnation: GOSUB END

Re:The Tombstone

Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.

...viewed as Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN

I understand the context in which the word "apology" is being used (as in "justification"), but I had to laugh at the semantics of "apologising for FORTRAN".

82 is a good innings. No matter what you think of FORTRAN as a language, I think it's safe to say that it, and later some of the other really early languages advanced computer science greatly during its infancy. We have a lot to thank Backus for.

Farewell John

       PROGRAM FAREWELL_JOHN
       IMPLICIT NONE

       PRINT *, 'Farewell John W. Backus'

       STOP
       END

*
* End indeed ...
*

It's a hoax

Nothing on Netcraft yet.

FFS a person died...

...you insensitive clods!!

Show some respect instead of making lame FORTRAN jokes...

Re:FFS a person died...

I don't mean to be insensitive, but a lot of people die every day. Why should I stop my daily routine for just one?

Exactly. Mocking FORTRAN is a mark of respect. We're much more insensitive to all those people who die and and don't mentioned, especially if it's the result of something easily fixed, like providing a supply of clean drinking water. A fair few people due to preventable causes whilst I was typing out this post; think about that you insensitive clod.

Re:FFS a person died...

Just because we're not openly weeping into our morning coffee does not mean we do not respect the talent and achievements of the man. I hate this attitude that death has to be seen as a sad or sorrowful time. If anything it should be a time to remember the person and their achievements; exactly what is happening here. The only time grief is called for is if you personally knew John Backus and will miss his company. Anything else is likely false grief, generated by some weird psychological conditioning that modern society has pushed on us that tells us we must grieve for people we do not know (See also: Princess Diana)

Be afraid, be very afraid

With both the lack of interest and the distortion of the original goal, Computer Science as we know may be dying with the elders. Computer Science originally had nothing to do with computers (as in personal computer) per se, but with the science of computation, optimal algorithms for pure math problems, etc. Actually, it was nothing but a branch of Math. The way computer science is being dealt with nowadays, with disdain, lack of interest and with people thinking about it as a tool to put another "screw tighter" professional in the market, soon we may run out of real breakthroughs like the ones those genius created to pave the yellow brick road we run over nowadays.

BNF

Backus is also the B in BNF. Many will mourn his parsing.

Fond Memories of FORTRAN IV

By the time I was clacking out my tragic FORTRAN programs on a card punch machine, the language was already over 20 years old.

An inspiration

Backus' Turing Award Lecture about FP was a true inspiration for me and has influenced a lot of what I have done over the years. Here's to you Mr Backus, your name will live on beyond eternity.

The mentioned Turing Award lecture

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs [stanford.edu]

No need to apologise

...Backus's apology for creating FORTRAN...

(yes, yes, I know, he's no apologising in the usual sense; this is a play on words, or a pun, as it is also known)

Still, FORTRAN was and still is one of the great programming languages. There are many languages that offer better features and are much suitable for general usage, but there's huge number of programs written in FORTRAN, and many in science still prefer it to C/C++; FORTRAN is very well suited for numerical calculations, which is after all what is was made for.

rest in peace

Maybe it's because I was breastfed with BASIC from a very young age, but when I was forced to learn FORTRAN to work on legacy code I discovered after some initial, computer science taught disgust, that it was really the best way to express myself in code, better than with anything else, and I owe my present university position to FORTRAN because it made me so productive. I guess it was because the language was conceived by engineer, scientists oriented types, and not by formal logic adepts or grammar nazis. I still teach FORTRAN to this day, using F90/F95 in all its power, and MATLAB-like exposed students tend to enjoy it because they can develop simple and efficient numerical codes much faster than with anything else; some of them found positions thanks to it. The trick is to use FORTRAN for what it's for (numerical arrays, heavy linear algebra, easily parallelizable scientific computing) and not strings or files manipulation, linked lists (LISP) , graphics or system : for that there is C(++), and tons of libraries. If the code grows larger than 10 000 lines, very strong discipline is necessary, and that's where true OO can be pertinent. In scientific code FORTRAN tends to be 20% faster than the best possible C++ implementation because the grammar is so simple that compilers tend to understand better the code and can vectorize or optimize it much farther than C ; and there is much less overhead than with C++ because the objects are simpler to manipulate. Major code used in the industry (Star-CD, Gaussian for instance) is still written in FORTRAN for those (and legacy) reasons.

Re:rest in peace

Mod parent up one more, he deserves a +5. As an engineering student in the later 70s/80s, Fortran was all I knew or cared to know. My one Comp Sci course was beginning Fortran programming -- the whole thing is probably learnable in a few hours today. My final year thesis was a 6000 line Fortran simulation used to determine the feasibility of building a "Two Stage Spouted Bed Coal Pyrolysis Plant" in China (it was).

95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.

It is easy to criticize, as many other posts have done, something invented half a century ago. Personally, I miss being able to use Fortran (or a procedural basic) to solve today's problems -- we've given ourselves over to the machine's favorite language (C) while we pat ourselves on the back for how smart we are now (as we create write-only code).

I wish this [cminusminus.org] had become more popular. There's still time.

Re:rest in peace

I too still teach my students (in physics and astronomy) to use Fortran, for many of the reasons listed above. While it may also be useful for them to go on to learn other languages, their primary focus is on the physics problems they need to solve and the numerical algorithms needed to help them do that. Fortran makes it easy for them to get started and then focus on the calculations, not on grammar or philosophy.

Fortran has been criticized because you can write "spaghetti code" or other crap, while other languages supposedly protect you from the mistakes you can make in Fortran. But you can write crappy code in any language (including "spaghetti classes"). I teach my students to write with good style. They know their code has to be clearly understandable not just to the machine but also to someone else who is familiar with the goal of the code but not the details. Trying to enforce good style through grammar is misguided at best, just as it is in writing in general. Developing good style is a personal, ongoing process for writing anything, including good code.

What's with the flaming?

What's so wrong with FORTRAN? From the sound of things, it's like the guy committed a crime or something...if it was so 'destructive' or whatever then how come it got so popular? Or did it? Why did so many choose to use it?
And for that matter, what IS 'constructive'? Maybe C++? And whatever that is, it wasn't influenced in any way by FORTRAN?

Just evolution, people... the TV scorning the radio as backward!?

obligatory

was he related to A Backus?

Just to give people something to think aboout.

If Mr. Backus hadn't developed fortran, would we be as advanced scientificaly as we are now?

I'll drink to that...

Raise your glasses to the spirit of Bacchus - he gave us a lot.

Remember him not for FORTRAN

I find it somewhat troubling that in this article John Backus is remembered primarily for the genie that he tried to put back in the bottle.

FORTRAN was utilitarian and procedural and good at enabling engineers and scientists to get work done. However, the problem with FORTRAN is the imperative pattern of though that it imposed led us to tell the computer a precise sequence of steps to accomplish each task. It doesn't offer information on dependencies, simply a "go here, do that" sequence of instructions. Imperative programs are inherently hard to reason about in terms of global state and effects and as written tend to be subject to off-by-one errors.

Backus saw this in 1978! See http://http//www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings /backus.pdf [http].

His insight spawned a great deal of the interest in functional programming languages. It was been credited by Paul Hudak of Haskell fame http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=72551.7255 4 [acm.org] (ACM membership required) (summarized here http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message4172 .html [lambda-the-ultimate.org]) and others as really helping to turn the tide and kept functional programming languages from being snuffed out.

A lot of people don't see the point, having never programmed in a functional programming language like Haskell or ML. However even those people see dozens of cores on the horizon and wonder how they are going to deal with the debugging issues associated with all of the threads to keep those processors churning.

Functional programming offers an alternative viewpoint that is arguably much better suited to handle multiple CPUs working on large datasets. A case for this was recently reiterated by Tim Sweeney of Epic Megagames fame who said "in a concurrent world, imperative is the wrong default!" http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/edu/seminare/2005/advan ced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf [uni-sb.de].

Haskell has brought Software Transactional Memory (STM) into play offering an alternative approach to traditional mutexes and locks that is compositional in nature unlike locking models. This is an approach that isn't readily emulable in an imperative setting because of the lack of guarantees about side effects. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/ index.htm [microsoft.com].

These are solutions to real problems that we are experiencing today, not some academic sideshow, and they arise from a school of thought that he helped bring a great deal of attention to.

If you want to do something to remember Backus take the time to learn OCaml or Haskell or even just take the time to learn how to effectively use the map and fold functions in Perl, PHP or Ruby.

It is his willingness to turn his back on what was percieved as his greatest work when confronted with a better idea for which I will remember him and I am a better programmer today for having learned what I could from his ideas.

FORTRAN greatest time save since assembler

First there was machine language. You hand coded all the little ones and zeros manually to get your machine code. Then came assembler which was a great time saver with all its mnemonics, registers and loops.

The next step was a real higher-level language: FORTRAN. Its estimated, that this meant a time saving ratio for programmers of 10:1 against assembler. This rate of improvement was never reached again. All other improvements in programming are only incremental compared to that.

Headline

John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN

In that order?

Burial

Like all old computer folks, they'll have to bury him 9 edge forward, face down.

GOTO considered harmful

Finally, proof that GOTO is harmful. Death.

Sigh...

Oh, my first program was in FORTRAN.

In FORTRAN "GOD" is REAL, unless declared INTEGER. ;-)

We've lost a wonderfully nice guy

When I was in my early 20s and had been programming only a few years, and John was already a legend and IBM Fellow for his work on FORTRAN, I had the pleasure of meeting him informally a few times. You would have thought our positions and experiences were nearly the same. He was always as engaged and delighted with younger people like me as with other giants of the computer field, some of whom were standing right with us at those get togethers (Jim Gray [wikipedia.org] comes to mind). John was extraordinarily decent, kind, and down-to-earth, and he will be very much missed.

I think some of the wise guys/gals on this list are missing the point of the FORTRAN team's contributions. It wasn't that FORTRAN was the perfect language. To some degree, that wasn't even the goal. Quoting from an an article by Backus [acm.org] (full text is available only to ACM subscribers, unfortunately):

"To this day I believe that our emphasis on object program efficiency rather than on language design was basically correct. I believe that had we failed to produce efficient programs, the widespread use of languages like FORTRAN would have been seriously delayed.".

At the time the FORTRAN work was done, people didn't believe that a compiler could produce code that was fast enough. If you go back to the early references on FORTRAN you'll find that they implemented optimizations that were still considered sophisticated 15 years later. The difference is: the FORTRAN team did it at a time when nobody had done it before. Furthermore, they did it on an IBM 704 [ibm.com] that would be too weak (if not too small!) to power a wrist watch today. Its core storage units [ibm.com] were tens of cubic feet in size, and each held 4K 36 bit words, or just over 32K bytes in modern terms. Even the "high speed" drum storage units (like a disk, but with no seeking needed) held only 16K of those 36 bit words. On this machine, they built optimizations that were considered sophisticated even decades later, when machines had gotten much bigger and faster. Quoting from that same article:

"It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into the details of the analysis which section 2 [I.e. the optimizer] carried out. It will suffice to say that it produced code of such efficiency that its output would startle the programmers who studied it. It moved code out of loops where that was possible; it took advantage of the differences between rowwise and column-wise scans; it took note of special cases to optimize even the exits from loops. The degree of optimization performed by section 2 in its treatment of indexing, array references, and loops was not equalled again until optimizing compilers began to appear in the middle and late sixties."

The computing field has lost someone very special.

Interesting

I read about him a few hours ago and Interestingly (and it seems erroneously) enough, my Discrete Mathematics book (Discrete Mathematics With Applications) lists him as having died in 1998.

R.I.P.

Rest in peace. His legasy lives on..

May he rest in peace.

May he rest in peace.

Face down, 9 edge first.

My first internship

During the 2nd year of my one and only Summer intern job, I got to write and run some FORTRAN (the year before that, I had to run the shredder and do other simple clerical stuff). It was probably about 100 lines and did a very simple analysis; but it was actually used. This was in 1987, so it wasn't punched cards though. I'm not that old. RIP Mr. Backus.

Ackerman ala Backus

{a(=@[1,%0]->+@[2,%1];(=@[2,%0]->a@[-@[1,%1],%1];a @[-@[1,%1],a@[1,-@[2,%1]]]))}

Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal

Back in the good old days-- the "Golden Era" of computers-- it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones who understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones who didn't. A real computer programmer said things like "DO 10 I=1,10" and "ABEND" (they actually talked in capital letters, you understand), and the rest of the world said things like "computers are too complicated for me" and "I can't relate to computers-- they're so impersonal". (A previous work [1] points out that Real Men don't "relate" to anything, and aren't afraid of being impersonal.)

(from Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal [pbm.com])

John Backus' surgeon

John Backus' surgeon said shortly after his death, "It's total spaghetti in there; I couldn't tell what connected to what and when I pulled something out he just woke up and sad 'NaNQ.'"

"FP" means "Functional Programming"

"FP" means "Functional Programming," not "Function-level Programming Language." It refers to a class of programming techniques, as well as to a type of programming language particularly suitable for applying those techniques. John Backus' Turing lecture on FP was a key inspiration for my own dissertation, as well as for a lot of work in Scheme, Haskell, and a host of other projects.

I see that others have already addressed some of the other foolishness in the lead article as well as the replies. John Backus was an outstandingly careful and insightful thinker, with a deep understanding of the difference between progress in a line of work and completion of that work. I don't care any more than I think he would have about an appearance of disrespect or lack of appreciation. But I encourage those who reacted superficially to the obituary to look more deeply into Backus' work, and use it as a model of effective thinking.

That includes the writer of the lead article. I read Slashdot first, because it so often provides a better introduction to the news than the New York Times. In this case, Slashdot fell down badly on the job.

Brain Surgery with Stone Knives

Backus, et al., wrote FORTRAN for and on the IBM 704. The 704 was a 36-bit vacuum tube machine that could sustain 4902 single-precision floating point multiplies per second. His team wrote the entire compiler in 704 assembler language, writing and maintaining its roughly 50,000 lines of code using punched cards and magnetic tape. Because a complete assembly of the compiler ran several hours, programmers made changes in binary machine code, noting them on a paper listing for later inclusion in the source.

They had to invent the compiler as they went along. Working toward the goal of producing code as good as that written by a skilled assembly language programmer, his team invented key optimizations including register renaming, code hoisting, branch prediction, and strength reduction. We continue to this day to use Backus-Naur Form (BNF) to describe a computer language's syntax.

And it worked. Truly brain surgery with stone knives.

St. Peter sends Backus to GOTO purgatory

Saint Peter, the guardian of Heaven's Gate decreed Backus will eventually be admitted to Heaven, but will have to execute a large FORTRAN program with lots of GOTOs in order to find the way into Heaven. That program will send him into infinate loops for millennia at a time, side track him to Hell, return him into the Void, not mention occasional ABEND-dumps(*) now and then.



(*) A "feature" in IBM systems when a program crashed it printed the contents of core memory in hexadecimal filling a hunderd pages or more. Not unlike JVM-hs-errs.

Tombstone should read...

GOTO NERD HEAVEN

FORTRAN matured as programming itself matured

FORTRAN was the only programming language I used for the first 20 or so years of my career, starting in 1964, first as an applied math student, and then as a scientist. I see that it is common today to ridicule it, and it is not much taught, nor are there many jobs for FORTRAN programmers today. It is true that FORTRAN progamming in the early days was difficult; and this has given FORTRAN a somewhat poor reputation. However, FORTRAN is not today a bad language, and it probably should be used more for purposes (math-science-engineering) that suit it.

There were, IMO, three main reasons why writing and debugging programs was more difficult and time-consuming in those days:

First, the techniques and procedures of programming were not well understood, and were therefore not well taught, in the 1960s. One had to learn, year by year, partly by trial and error and partly by reading about new thinking in the field, to program better. One had to learn about consistent, well-organized, readable style, systematic testing and bug-finding, avoidance of methods that caused buggy programs, and so on. As the skill and science of computing matured, techniques improved, and programmers were able to be more productive.

Second, FORTRAN itself had to mature (as other posters have noted). When it was first created in the 1950s, as the first real programming language, the techniques of writing a good programming language were not understood. Therefore the first versions of FORTRAN lacked important features (such as IF-THEN-ELSE constructions), and programming with these versions was troublesome. However, later versions of FORTRAN are much better; FORTRAN 77 is usable, and current FORTRAN is reasonably good. I might add that I think it might be easier to write reliable code in modern FORTRAN than in C; C has bug-inducing pitfalls such as "pointers" and IMO is less readable than FORTRAN.

Third, the technical resources available in "the bad old days" were by today's standards poor. Programs had to be punched onto cards. Since one's workplace did not generally have its own computer, one had to hand carry the deck of cards to an available computer (in my experience sometimes a half-hour trip each way). One generally had to wait several hours for the output, so there would be only 1-2 turnarounds possible a day. Output was on the old-fashioned large-format computer paper. One's only record of past work on a project was a bulky and cumbersome stack of this paper output.

FORTRAN tended in time to become a scapegoat for the difficulties caused by poor programming practices and now-antiquated resources. Those problems that were in fact caused by the old-type FORTRAN have been mostly eliminated in later versions.

Not just the shoulders, but beside giants

I am one of the over-50 programmers here - actually, I'm over 60 - and two of my first four programming languages were Algol 60 (which was initially defined in 1958 - yes I know, I know), and Fortran IV. I loved both of these languages. Learning the detail of Algol very much allowed me to grasp C quickly (and learn it in detail).

And Fortan? Well, I have just finished working with the Met Office (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ [metoffice.gov.uk]) and, yes, they do use Fortran - and just last year I had to translate great swathes of it into C so that it could run on a system that lacked a Fortran compiler. Engineers are not bad programmers - but they do want access to complex - and fully tested - routines that already exist. So Fortran is going to continue for quite some while yet - a few more decades at least.

People of my age stand not just on the shoulders of giants, but beside them. The abstract conversations in which us geeks revel were much harder to set up - and be paid for - in the 1950s. People of all ages should thank John Backus in memoriam for his technical vision and inventiveness.

Re:Obligatory

while (Backus--);

Re:RIP and thank you

Old programmers never die, they just GOSUB with no RETURN

Re:Famous for two other things as well

Are you sure you don't mean Jim Backus, you know, the guy that played Mr. Howell on Gilligan's Island, and was the voice of Mr. Magoo.

Re:Obligatory

I won't believe that until Netcraft or Dvorack confirm it.

Re:End of an era

I came here to make the same stupid comment.

Though I know Jim Backus died 'way back in the 80's. I remember because I was in Vegas at the time, so I got my picture in front of the million dollars at the old Vegas World in his honor.

Re:Fortran was horrible

So typical. An average mind responsible for something that everyone used just because it was all that was out there.

Well, I wouldn't be at all surprised that the browser you're using and the operating system it's running on were compiled using optimizers that are the direct descendants of Backus' original FORTRAN compilers. As discussed in my post above [slashdot.org], those optimizers were the real point of the FORTRAN project. Remember also that FORTRAN was designed in 1954, when the alternative was assembler or machine language. Backus was ahead of the industry in realizing what high level languages could do, and later ahead of the industry in recognizing that his own FORTRAN was not a good long term design point; as others have noted, he devoted the latter part of his professional career to promoting functional languages. There too, he was years or even decades ahead of, not behind the curve. Did you know John personally? I did, at least a bit. He was neither an average mind nor an average person.