RIP John Backus

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Today comes the unhappy news of the passing of John Backus, creator of FORTRAN, the first high-level computer language.

T-SQL (and indeed all the other dialects we use to code computers today, from Java to C# to Ada) all rose from FORTRAN's seed. Conceived in the 1950s, it was used productively until well into the 1980s. My very first job in the business, after my senior year of high school, involved converting subroutines from Hewlett Packard FORTRAN to Sperry Univac FORTRAN.

Thank you, Mr. Backus, for helping to pioneer what we today take for granted.

     -wp