The Independent - London, March 30th, 2007
For a three-year period in 1954-57, John Backus, a mathematician in his early thirties, led the IBM Fortran project. Fortran was a new programming language that enabled programs to be written compactly in English and mathematical symbols instead of the binary- oriented machine language that computers understood.
It was not the first programming language, but its predecessors produced very inefficient programs. Fortran, however, produced programs that were as good as those written by human programmers. By enabling engineers and scientists to write their own programs, instead of employing a pro...
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