if (backus.LT.alive) then write (*,*) ‘farewell’ endif
March 20, 2007 by cynthia
Dr. Backus, one of the inventors of the FORTRAN programming language, has died.
Backus, a member of the IBM braintrust that did so much for computing in the 50s and 60s, created FORTRAN (which is short for FORmula TRANslator) as one of the very early “human” program languages. In those days, it was more common to machine-code. FORTRAN used standard English words, arranged in mathematical syntax, and it was relatively easy to learn.
It wasn’t like there weren’t other languages out there, but for the time this one was pretty conversational, and that was cool. By the time I got around to learning it, though, its popularity was dying. I soon abandoned it for Pascal and C and then C++…but I doubt I would have done that if FORTRAN hadn’t made it so easy to write my first program.
I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Backus as a CSci student in college…my team was going out to do a project at a local hospital (with FORTRAN) and we timidly proffered our code. He offered a few suggestions and then said something that’s helped me through most of my career: “Never lose sight of the fact that the customer, not the computer, is the end goal.”
Farewell, Dr. Backus.
No related posts.
Yup, let’s place a “1″ in the first column of our FORMAT statements so we can do a high-speed chain printer full-box-of-paper-in-five-seconds page eject sequence in his honour.
Gary (I first learned Fortran IV on an IBM 1130 in ’68) Brown
IBM 1130–you beat me, then. My school had an old VAX, but I pretty quickly got a compiler for my home IBM PC (and had to upgrade to a whole 640K RAM) so I could “practice.” I remember my professor insisted that I code twice–once on a keyboard and again on punch cards “…because you never know when those monitor things will fail…” Since PCs (and monitors and keyboards) had been around for years this was not exactly forward thinking…
To me, the REAL test of an old timer is if you know how to do an 029 keypunch drum control card! Of course you know the reason that DOS monitors are 80 characters wide, don’t you? The Hollerith card was 80 columns!
Oh my, the glass folks are going to think they wandered in the Wrong Blog! Oh well, I’ll just send ‘em over to http://www.userfriendly.org to see what REAL geeks are like .
GcB
Knew about the Hollerith card columns (some trivia just stays with you, I guess), but wouldn’t have the faintest about how to do an 029…just as well, I guess.
This blog is the biggest grab-bag of stuff I’ve seen, I think, so anybody coming here looking for glass is liable to find…obituaries for famous computer programmers…