The April 26 issue of NATURE reports the death of John Backus on March 17, 2007.
John Warner Backus (1924-2007) was both a person interested in Chemistry as well as a brilliant software engineer and computer scientist.
In the 50s he worked at IBM on a program he called the FORmula TRANslator, which quickly became FORTRAN – without any doubt the most influential programming language in science so far.
My first encounter with John Backus’ work was when listening to the computer science student with whom I shared an apartment during my chemistry studies. The Backus-Naur Form (BNF) – a notation for grammars of programming languages – is part of every computer science curriculum. Later I found it used by Axel Brunger to specify the grammar of the scripting language driving his restrained MD package XPLOR.
John Backus received the Turing Award in 1997 for his work on FORTRAN and on the Bachus-Naur-Form.
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