John Backus was a computer language pioneer

John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.

Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career.

Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously “hand-coded” – programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a “high-level” language because it abstracted that work – it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.

“It was just a quantum leap. It changed the game in a way that has only happened two or three times in the computer industry,” said Jim Horning, a longtime programmer who is a co-chairman for the Association for Computing Machinery’s award committee.

That organization gave Backus its 1977 Turing Award, one of the industry’s highest accolades. Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.