John Backus

High school (ages 12+)
Science & Technology

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/john-backus

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. When was John Backus born?December 3, 1924
2. Where was John Backus born?Chester, Pennsylvania, USA
3. What is John Backus known for?FORTRAN, BNF, advocacy for function-level programming
4. What did John Backus help create that made computers easier to use?He led the team that made FORTRAN, the first high‑level language that let scientists write math formulas instead of machine code.
5. Why is FORTRAN important?It let people write programs in plain English‑like words, and the computer could run them almost as fast as hand‑written code, so many scientists used it.

High-Level Programming Language: A programming language with strong programming structures, abstraction from the detail of computers, and often natural language elements.
Backus-Naur Form (BNF): A notation used to express context-free grammars, commonly used to define the syntax of programming languages.
Syntax: The set of rules that governs the structure of statements in a programming language, analogous to grammar in human languages.
Function-Level Programming: A programming paradigm that emphasizes the use of functions as the primary building blocks, often avoiding mutable state and side effects.