На прошлой неделе
в возрасте 82 лет умер Джон Бэкус, автор Фортрана, формализма Бэкуса-Наура, да и вообще пионер программирования.
Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers of those days,” Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.
-- из
некролога.