Fortran creator John Backus dead at 82 (last week)

From the CBC:

John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed the way people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died at 82.

Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously “hand-coded” — programmed in raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a “high-level” language because it abstracted that work — it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.

Somehow I missed this announcement last week. It made me a bit sad when I read it. Although BASIC was the first computing language I learned I did a lot of serious Fortran 77 programming.

The most serious was development on (I didn’t create it) a gigantic program at university for calculating all sorts of thermodynamic properties. That was in 1988-89.

The second biggest was creating a post-processing program for a Canadian navy ship motion program in 1992. It allowed scientists to graph the results of the program output more easily.