Fortran father John Backus, dead at 82
John Backus made software back when no one called it software. As the project leader of the IBM team which created the venerable Fortran language, Backus helped define the "hacker ethic". Leading a small team to do great things quickly, and leverage their own mistakes in order to learn, Backus shattered the paradigm of 1950s corporate IBM and, developed a language that is only now beginning to ...





