John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist and winner of the 1977 Turing Award. He led the team that invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also helped to popularize function-level programming.More
