Submission + - RIP, John Backus.
rjh writes: "John Backus has died. During his epic career he developed FORTRAN, invented the BNF syntax for describing programming languages, pioneered functional programming — oh, and even picked up a Turing Award here and there. This ends a career that can only be described as legendary. See you around, John, and thanks for all the elegant hacks. We'll miss you."