My first programming language was Fortran.
John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.[1]
While Fortran got me started in Computer Science, it was BNS (Backus Naur Form) that got me through my first years after graduation, when I spent a lot of time developing drivers to parse arbitrary text strings generated by imperfect OCR readers.
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