In this episode of pplpod, we explore the fascinating life of John Backus, the American computer scientist who revolutionized computing by leading the team that invented Fortran, the first widely used high-level programming language. We discuss his tumultuous early years, which included being expelled from the University of Virginia for poor attendance and dropping out of medical school after finding it uninteresting. Listeners will learn about his resilience, from serving as an anti-aircraft battery commander in WWII to surviving a cranial bone tumor, for which he eventually designed his own replacement skull plate.
We also dive into his massive technical contributions at IBM, where he developed Speedcoding and the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a standard notation for defining the syntax of formal languages. Finally, we examine his later career shift toward function-level programming and his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture, "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?". Join us to learn how a man who struggled in the classroom ended up making computers accessible to scientists worldwide.
