Backus led the IBMInternational Business Machines — a major computer and enterprise technology company since the early 20th century. team that created FortranFormula Translation — one of the first high-level languages, dominant in science and engineering. and later argued for functional programmingA style emphasizing functions and immutable data over step-by-step state changes — influences Haskell, Lisp, and modern languages. in his TuringAlan Turing — mathematician who defined computability, broke Enigma, and posed the imitation game. lecture. BNF became the standard notation for describing programming language syntax.

Backus shaped both practical compilers and formal language specification.

FortranFormula Translation — one of the first high-level languages, dominant in science and engineering. proved high-level languageA programming language closer to human logic than machine code — compiled or interpreted into lower-level instructions.s could match hand-coded assembly languageA low-level human-readable form of machine instructions — one step above raw binary code. performance.