1977 约翰·巴克斯

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John Backus

PHOTOGRAPHS
BIRTH:
December 3, 1924, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

DEATH:
March 17, 2007, Ashland, Oregon, United States

EDUCATION:
BS mathematics (Columbia University, 1949); AM mathematics (Columbia University,1950); Honorary degree (Université Henre Poincaré, 1989).

EXPERIENCE:
US Army (antiaircraft battery crew; engineering and premed school, 1942-1946); IBM (programmer of Pure & Advanced Science Departments, 1950–1954; manager of Programming Research Department, 1954–1959; research staff, 1959–1963; IBM Fellow, 1963–1991); University of California, Santa Cruz (adjunct professor of information sciences, 1974); University of California, Berkeley (visiting professor, 1980; visiting professor, 1985).

HONORS AND AWARDS:
IBM Fellow (1963); IEEE Computer Society W. W. McDowell Award (1967); National Medal of Science (1975); ACM Turing Award (1977); National Academy of Engineering Draper Prize (1993); Computer History Museum Fellow (1997); Asteroid 6830 Johnbackus named in his honor (June 1, 2007).

JOHN BACKUS DL Author Profile link
United States – 1977
CITATION
For profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages.

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VIDEO INTERVIEW
John Warner Backus was born on December 3, 1924, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, the son of a wealthy stockbroker. He attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He was not a good student, although he eventually graduated in 1942, whereupon he entered the University of Virginia and majored in chemistry. There he also had a difficult time at school, and was eventually expelled due to poor attendance after less than a year. He was then drafted into the US Army where, with the rank of corporal, he commanded an antiaircraft battery at Fort Stewart, Georgia and stayed in the United States for the remainder of World War II.

Due to excellent results on his military aptitude tests, Backus was first directed to the engineering program at the University of Pittsburgh and later to a premedical program at Haverford College outside of Philadelphia. During his medical studies, he was diagnosed with a cranial bone tumor, which was surgically removed and replaced with a metal plate. In March 1945, he attended the Flower and Fifth Avenue Medical School in New York City, but dropped out after nine months “because all you had to do was memorize stuff[1]”. After one more operation to replace the plate in his head, this time with one he made himself, Backus left the army in 1946 with an honorable medical discharge.

Backus settled in New York City, but was undecided about his future. Although he had no skills in electronics, he entered a radio technician school to learn how to build a radio receiver. That work led him to study mathematics, and so he enrolled in a mathematical program at Columbia University. In the spring of 1949, just before his graduation, he happened to be walking by the IBM Computing Center on Madison Avenue where IBM had their Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), a one-of-a-kind relay and vacuum tube computer designed at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia. He made a passing comment to his tour guide about his interest in working on the computer, was immediately taken upstairs to meet the SSEC project director, and hired on the spot as a programmer.

Backus describes IBM’s gigantic SSEC, the first computer he programmed.        
One of the main uses of the SSEC at that time was the calculation of ephemeris tables, a task on which Backus worked for three years. The techniques developed by Backus and his team were later used by NASA for the Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s.

Programming at that time meant writing instructions at the machine level. To facilitate the process, Backus invented a program called Speedcoding [1, 2], which allowed operations on floating point numbers to be described in a more symbolic form. At that time IBM was developing the IBM 704, a scientific computer built with vacuum tubes and core memory that was designed primarily for floating point operations. In 1953, based on his work with Speedcoding, Backus proposed the creation of a new language that would make it easier to program the 704.

IBM management accepted Backus’ proposal, and he eventually assembled a ten-person team that worked out of the IBM World Headquarters in Manhattan. About a year later, his team had enough confidence in their work to release the Preliminary Report, Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System, FORTRAN (available here).

Backus describes the creation of FORTRAN, the first high level programming language.        
The FORTRAN project took about two years from conception to first release, and the program consisted of over 25,000 lines of machine language. Eventually every IBM 704 sold included the FORTRAN program and its accompanying manual. For several more years, Backus and his team continued to refine the FORTRAN program—which we would today call a compiler—until it finally reached a reasonable degree of stability and correctness. FORTRAN gained considerable traction in the scientific community, and became the dominant programming language for scientific applications for many decades.

Efforts were soon underway to develop other high-level programming languages that attended to the needs of writing algorithms more clearly. Backus joined an international committee to design the ALGOrithmic programming Language, ALGOL 58, and its successor, ALGOL 60. The ALGOL language descriptions used a context-free grammar to formally describe its syntax, and Backus collaborated with Peter Naur, in developing the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) notation that was used. BNF represented a significant milestone in the formalization of programming languages.

Backus describes the genesis of BNF, a method for diagramming the syntax of programming languages.        
In 1963, Backus was made an IBM Fellow, the year the Fellow program was first established by Thomas Watson, Jr. In this position Backus was given considerable freedom to pursue whatever projects he desired, which included teaching assignments at the University of California in Santa Cruz and Berkeley.

Backus continued his work in programming languages in relative isolation. He eventually made contributions to functional programming with the creation of a new language, FP (Functional Programming). While the theoretical foundations of functional programming had been established earlier with the lambda calculus as manifested in John McCarthy’s Lisp, Backus’ work made functional programming more accessible and so launched a renaissance in research on the topic. Backus retired from IBM in 1991.

Backus describes his shift of focus to functional programming, which differs fundamentally from the procedural approach taken by FORTRAN.        
John Backus was married twice, first to Marjorie Jamison, whom he divorced in 1966, then to Barbara Una Stanard in 1968. Backus had two children, Karen and Paula. Barbara died in 2004, whereupon Backus moved to Ashland, Oregon, to live near Paula. Backus died on March 17, 2007 in Ashland.

Author: Grady Booch

[1] Computer History Museum oral history



约翰-巴斯克斯

照片
出生地：美国
1924年12月3日，美国宾夕法尼亚州，费城

逝世
2007年3月17日，美国俄勒冈州阿什兰市

学历：数学学士（哥伦比亚大学，1949年）。
数学学士（哥伦比亚大学，1949年）；数学硕士（哥伦比亚大学，1950年）；荣誉学位（Henre Poincaré大学，1989年）。

工作经验。
美国陆军（防空炮组；工程和医学预科学校，1942-1946）；IBM（纯科学和高级科学部门的程序员，1950-1954；编程研究部门经理，1954-1959；研究人员，1959-1963；IBM研究员，1963-1991）；加利福尼亚大学，圣克鲁兹（信息科学兼职教授，1974）；加利福尼亚大学，伯克利（访问教授，1980；访问教授，1985）。

荣誉和奖项。
IBM研究员（1963年）；IEEE计算机协会W.W.McDowell奖（1967年）；国家科学奖（1975年）；ACM图灵奖（1977年）；国家工程院Draper奖（1993年）；计算机历史博物馆研究员（1997年）；小行星6830 Johnbackus以其名字命名（2007年6月1日）。

约翰-巴克斯（JOHN BACKUS）DL作者简介链接
美国 - 1977年
褒奖
对实用高级编程系统的设计做出了深刻的、有影响力的和持久的贡献，特别是通过他在FORTRAN上的工作，以及对编程语言规范的正式程序的开创性出版。

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约翰-华纳-巴克斯于1924年12月3日出生在宾夕法尼亚州的费城，在特拉华州的威尔明顿长大，是一个富裕的股票经纪人的儿子。他在宾夕法尼亚州波茨敦的希尔学校上学。他不是一个好学生，尽管他最终在1942年毕业，在那里他进入弗吉尼亚大学，主修化学。在那里，他在学校也遇到了困难，最终在不到一年的时间里由于出勤率低而被开除。随后，他被征召加入美国陆军，以下士军衔在乔治亚州斯图尔特堡指挥一个防空炮兵连，并在第二次世界大战的剩余时间里一直留在美国。

由于在军事能力测试中取得了优异的成绩，巴克斯首先被引导到匹兹堡大学的工程项目，后来又被引导到费城外的哈弗福德学院的医学预科项目。在医学学习期间，他被诊断出患有颅骨肿瘤，经手术切除后用金属板代替。1945年3月，他在纽约市的花卉和第五大道医学院学习，但9个月后退学，"因为你要做的就是背诵东西[1]"。在又做了一次手术以替换他头上的钢板（这次是他自己做的）之后，巴斯克斯于1946年以光荣退伍的名义离开了军队。

巴克斯在纽约市定居，但对自己的未来还没有定论。虽然他没有电子方面的技能，但他进入了一所无线电技师学校，学习如何建造一个无线电接收器。这项工作促使他学习数学，因此他进入了哥伦比亚大学的数学课程。1949年春天，就在他毕业之前，他碰巧路过麦迪逊大道上的IBM计算中心，那里有IBM的选择性序列电子计算器（SSEC），这是哥伦比亚大学沃森科学计算实验室设计的独一无二的继电器和真空管计算机。他向导游顺便说了一下他对计算机工作的兴趣，立即被带上楼去见SSEC项目主管，并当场被聘为程序员。

巴克斯描述了IBM巨大的SSEC，这是他编程的第一台计算机。        
当时SSEC的主要用途之一是计算星历表，巴克斯为这项任务工作了三年。巴克斯和他的团队开发的技术后来被美国宇航局用于60年代的阿波罗登月任务。

当时的编程意味着在机器层面上编写指令。为了促进这个过程，巴克斯发明了一个叫做Speedcoding的程序[1，2]，它允许以更多的符号形式来描述浮点数的操作。当时，IBM正在开发IBM 704，这是一台用真空管和核心存储器建造的科学计算机，主要为浮点运算而设计。1953年，基于他在Speedcoding方面的工作，Backus提议创建一种新的语言，以使704的编程更加容易。

IBM管理层接受了巴克斯的建议，他最终组建了一个10人的团队，在曼哈顿的IBM世界总部工作。大约一年后，他的团队对他们的工作有了足够的信心，发布了《初步报告》，即《IBM数学公式翻译系统FORTRAN的规格》（可在此查阅）。

Backus描述了FORTRAN的创建，这是第一种高级编程语言。        
FORTRAN项目从构思到首次发布花了大约两年时间，该程序由超过25000行的机器语言组成。最终，每一个出售的IBM 704都包括FORTRAN程序和其附带的手册。又过了几年，巴克斯和他的团队继续完善FORTRAN程序--我们今天称之为编译器--直到它最终达到一个合理的稳定性和正确性程度。FORTRAN在科学界获得了相当大的吸引力，并成为几十年来科学应用的主流编程语言。

很快，开发其他高级编程语言的努力正在进行，这些语言更明确地关注了编写算法的需要。巴克斯加入了一个国际委员会来设计ALGOrithmic编程语言，ALGOL 58，以及它的后继者ALGOL 60。ALGOL语言描述使用了无上下文语法来正式描述其语法，巴克斯与彼得-瑙尔合作，开发了使用的巴克斯-瑙尔形式（BNF）符号。BNF是编程语言形式化的一个重要里程碑。

巴克斯描述了BNF的起源，这是一种为编程语言的句法提供图表的方法。        
1963年，Backus被任命为IBM研究员，这一年，小托马斯-沃森首次设立了研究员计划。在这个职位上，Backus获得了相当大的自由，可以追求他想要的任何项目，其中包括在圣克鲁斯和伯克利的加利福尼亚大学的教学任务。

巴克斯在相对孤立的情况下继续他在编程语言方面的工作。他最终对函数式编程做出了贡献，创造了一种新的语言，FP（功能编程）。虽然函数式编程的理论基础早些时候已经通过John McCarthy的Lisp中体现的lambda calculus建立起来，但Backus的工作使函数式编程更容易理解，因此在这个主题的研究中发起了一场复兴。Backus于1991年从IBM退休。

Backus描述了他对函数式编程的重点转移，它与FORTRAN所采取的程序性方法有根本的不同。        
John Backus有两次婚姻，第一次是Marjorie Jamison，他在1966年与她离婚，然后在1968年与Barbara Una Stanard离婚。巴克斯有两个孩子，凯伦和保拉。芭芭拉于2004年去世，此后巴克斯搬到俄勒冈州的阿什兰，住在宝拉附近。巴克斯于2007年3月17日在阿什兰去世。

作者。格雷迪-布赫

[1] 计算机历史博物馆口述历史