“Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”

About John Backus

Computer Scientist • American

John Backus was a pioneering American computer scientist who directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language. His work on FORTRAN significantly reduced the...