John W. Backus, the man who developed the FORTRAN computer language, died last Saturday. FORTRAN is the first computer language that I learned and I owe a lifetime of job security to this man. Learning FORTRAN was like remembering something that I already knew. It was natural, easy, orderly and made so much sense to me that I never thought about doing anything else with my life. Thanks, John!

You need the willingness to fail all the time, You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work. – John W. Backus