RIP John Backus
by DanJohn Backus was the guy who looked at machine code and punch cards and said, “There has to be a better way.” His solution was FORTRAN, which in the words of his New York Times obituary, “changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans.” He also developed the notation for any programming language that helped in the development of compilers. Anyone who has ever written a line of code owes him their thanks and his family their condolences. He passed away on Saturday at age 82.
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