John Backus was an American computer scientist who made significant contributions to the development of computer science. He is best known for his work on the FORTRAN programming language, which revolutionized the way computers were programmed. He also developed the Backus-Naur
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages. He also contributed to the design of ALGOL, and later researched the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"