Post-Fortran, Backus worked with Danish computer scientist Peter Naur to develop a notation to describe the structure of programming languages, dubbed the Backus-Naur form.

Old Glories: Fortran and Cobol are still among the world's most popular programming languages despite being almost 70 years old. They're certainly overachieving, but for entirely different reasons ...

Fortran is the oldest commercial programming language, designed at IBM in the 1950s. And even though, for years, programmers have been predicting its demise, 64 years later it's still kicking ...

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.