TITLE: END DO
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 21, 2007  4:35 PM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
<IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/people/john-backus.jpg"
     ALT="John Backus"
     WIDTH="125"
     ALIGN="left">

What prompted me to finally
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-03.html#e2007-03-21T14_03_39.htm">
   write about</A>
Frances Allen winning the Turing Award was a bit of
<A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/business/20backus.html">
   sad news</A>.
One of the pioneers of computing, John Backus,
<A HREF="http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/03/20/obit.backus.ap/">
   has died</A>.
Like Allen, Backus also worked in the area of programming
languages.  He is most famous as the creator of Fortran,
as reported in the <EM>Times</EM> piece:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and
computers, moving up a level to a language that was more
comprehensible by humans.  So Fortran, in computing vernacular,
is considered the first successful higher-level language."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I most often think of Backus's contribution in terms of the
compiler for Fortran.  His motivation to write the compiler
and design the language was that shared by many computer
scientists through history: laziness.  Here is my favorite
quote from the CNN piece:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus told Think,
the IBM employee magazine, in 1979.  "I didn't like writing
programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early
computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories,
I started work on a programming system to make it easier to
write programs."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Work on a programming system to make it easier to write
programs...  This is the beginning of computer science as we
know it!

Backus's work laid the foundation for Fran Allen's work; in
fact, her last big project was called PTRAN, an homage to
Fortran that stands for Parallel TRANslation.

One of my favorite Backus papers is his Turing Award essay,
<A HREF="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359579">
   Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?</A>
(subtitled: A Functional Style and its Algebra of Programs).
After all his years working on language for programmers and
translators for machines, he had reached a conclusion that
the mainstream computing world is still catching up to, that
a functional programming style may serve us best.  Every
computer scientist should read it.

This isn't the first time I've written of the passing of a
Turing Award winner.  A couple of years ago, I commented on
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-10.html#e2004-10-22T09_45_52.htm">
   Kenneth Iverson</A>,
also closely associated with his own programming language,
APL.  Ironically, APL offers a most extreme form of liberation
from the von Neumann machine.  Thinking of Iverson and Backus
together at this time seems especially fitting.

The Fortran programmers among us know what the title means.
RIP.
-----