John Backus

John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language. He was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF). 
He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1977 ACM Turing Award.