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John Backus, inventor of Fortran, Turing Award winner, and also an early pioneer in functional programming, died Saturday at his home in Oregon. Many of us have fond memories of him in the earlier days of our careers, and we all owe a lot to him for giving credibility to functional programming through his Turing Award lecture, "Can Programming Be Libarated From the von Neumann style?" Here is an article from the New York Times.

BUSINESS   | March 20, 2007
John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies
By STEVE LOHR
Mr. Backus assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language.