John W. Backus, a key early developer of programing languages, has died at age 82. (New York Times.)
For those of us who took computer programming courses back in the 1960's, the first high-level language we learned was FORTRAN. My first computer course provided six weeks of programming in machine language (that's programming in the native zeros and ones that the machine recognizes,) followed by an IBM assembly language called Symbolic Processing System (or something pretty close to that) and finally six weeks of FORTRAN. That was sort of like wriggling forward on the belly, then crawling forward, followed by standing up and walking with dispatch to get to where you wanted the computer to go.
If you have ever programmed a DOS computer in BASIC, you have programmed in the direct descendant of FORTRAN. Assembler and FORTRAN are both compiled languages, meaning that there are two steps involved. You write your program in the high-level language, then run your program through a "compiler," a computer program that translates your program into machine language in ones and zeros that the computer can understand.
Everyone today who works with a computer owes John W. Backus a great debt for his work.
