Fortran Inventor RIP

The passing of John Backus is to programmers what the passing of the guy who invented the claw hammer would be to carpenters. Depending on your age, if you're a programmer, you generally cut your eye teeth on Fortran like I did. You also learned it in some field other than Computer Science.

Shortly before he graduated [in 1950], Mr. Backus wandered by the I.B.M. headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display.

When a tour guide inquired, Mr. Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Mr. Backus described as math “brain teasers.” It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score.

He was hired on the spot. As what? “As a programmer,” Mr. Backus replied, shrugging. “That was the way it was done in those days.”

Back then, there was no field of computer science, no courses or schools. The first written reference to “software” as a computer term, as something distinct from hardware, did not come until 1958.

In spite of all the new languages and techniques developed over the years, Fortran is still going strong. We will now return to our regularly scheduled non-techno-weepy blog postings.