John Warner Backus (3 December 1924 - 17 March 2007) was an American computer scientist and leader of the team that invented FORTRAN, the world's first high-level language. He was the person who developed BNF, the notation that defines the syntax of formal languages, and invented the concept of function-level programming and the FP language that implements it(Dines Bjorner. 2008).
In 1953, Backus submitted a memorandum to Cuthbert Hurd, then chairman of IBM, suggesting the design of a programming language close to human language to replace machine language, and Hurd approved the plan. The world's first high-level computer language, FORTRAN (formula translation), was first used on the IBM 704 computer. Since then, FORTRAN has been standardised and is in widespread use on Windows and Linux platforms.
Compared to high-level programming languages such as JAVA and C++, FORTRAN lacks creativity(Seth R Johnson et al. 2020. p85). However, since many of the best engineering computing software is written in the FORTRAN language, such as ANSYS and Marc, in order to become proficient in using the advanced features of these commercial software, users must first learn the FORTRAN language in order to write application interfaces. This has defined the long dominance of FORTRAN in the field of engineering computing.
Following these successes accomplished by Backus, he moved to the Watson Research Centre in the 1960s, where he was involved in the design of the ALGOL language and was awarded the Turing Award, the highest prize in computing, at the ACM annual meeting in Seattle on 17 October 1977, where he presented a paper entitled "Can Programming be Literated from the von Neumann Style?A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs"(John Warner Backus. 1978). Backus retired in 1991 and three years later the American Academy of Engineering awarded him the Charles Stark Draper Award. Sadly, he died at his home in Oregon, USA, on 17 March 2007 at the age of 82(Dines Bjorner. 2008).
References:
Dines Bjorner. 2008. John Warner Backus: 3 Dec 1924–17 March 2007. Formal aspects of computing, 2008, Vol.20 (3), p.239-240
John Warner Backus. 1978. Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?: a functional style and its algebra of programs. Communications of the ACM, 1978, Vol.21 (8), p.613-641
Seth R Johnson, Andrey Prokopenko, Katherine J Evans, Jeffrey Carver, Karla Morris, United States: IEEE. 2020. Automated Fortran-C++ Bindings for Large-Scale Scientific Applications. Computing in science & engineering, 2020, Vol.22 (5), p.84-94