This is not exactly news, but I found in my internet travels this story : http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/03/21/backus_obit/

about the passing away of John Backus, the original developer of the FORTRAN language.

This brings back memories for me. I am old enough to remember programing in BASIC on an old teletype machine at my school in London (Battersea Grammar School). A bunch of us fellow geeks clubbed together and organised a FORTRAN course at Imperial College, London. From paper tape, we progressed to punch cards. Ahh, those were the days.. You submitted your program to a punch card operator who duly typed in your code and then ran your application, giving you the printout of your success or failure a couple of hours later.

So far away from hitting F5 in Visual Studio...

FORTRAN was in my life for sometime after that. I worked in the Geophysical industry for a while, in Norway and Scotland (for a company called Geoteam). FORTRAN was the language for all the seismic processing applications, which were run on DEC VAX/VMS computers.

I haven't been in that industry for a long time now, but I wonder if good old Fortran (yes it lost its capitalisation, eventually succumbing to fashion) is still used in that industry. There was just so much of that Fortran code...

In that article, there was a link to a paper Backus had written in 1977

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf

about functional programming, entitled

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von