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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."
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.
PROGRAM FAREWELL_JOHN
...
IMPLICIT NONE
PRINT *, 'Farewell John W. Backus'
STOP
END
*
* End indeed
*
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.
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.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.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
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)