Fortran pioneer drops off the mortal coil

In the days before Fortran, some reckon computers had to be programmed in a raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" language which made it possible to let programmers write commands that the computer could translate into machine code. Until then high level languages had not worked too well.

Backus claimed that he invented Fortran because he was lazy and didn't like programming. He was working on the IBM 701 writing programs for computing missile trajectories and he developed a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

Backus started his career at IBM working on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, an early computer stuffed with 13,000 valves, or vacuum tubes as the Americans call them. He later was involved in computing lunar positions Big Blue's top computers in the 1950s.

His Fortran code reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20 it's reckoned, here. µ