The guy that invented FORTRAN died this month, John Backus. For those of you without the wonderful sublime pleasure of knowing FORTRAN, it was the first high-level programming language ever invented. This means that it was the first one to sort of kind of look like English. If you have actually used it before, you know that “sort of kind of” is the operative word there, but then again, if any of you have programmed in assembly before, you also know what a wonderful gift to the world FORTRAN was.

This guy has an awesome quote which describes I think a defining motivating characteristic of Computer Scientists and Programmers:

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 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

Why spend an hour doing something when you can spend 5 hours figuring out how to get a computer to do it for you? There is no good reason.

Another interesting tidbit is that FORTRAN was apparently the first programming language to come with a manual. This is a feat that is still yet to be equaled even today by much of the community.

Here is an illuminating quote from one such manual:

“The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.” —Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

On a final note, an interesting thing about Computer Science is that it is such a young field. Right now, many of the people that invented some of the major first steps are still alive, or, in this case, are dying now. That is always crazy to me, since so many other things were invented so long ago that you only hear about the people in history books, instead of in the news.

RIP, John, you will live on in the dreams and nightmares of engineers and programmers everywhere (respectively).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran - WARNING: contains numerous awesome nerdy FORTRAN jokes