John Backus

He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1977 ACM Turing Award “for profound influential and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems notably through his work on FORTRAN and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages. During his first three years he worked on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC); his first major project was to write a program to calculate positions of the Moon. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF) the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax.

McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF) the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. John Warner Backus (December 3 1924 – March 17 2007) was an American computer scientist.