One of the founders of Algol and Agile software development has passed away

By admin On Jan 4, 2016

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One of the founders of the programming language Algol 60 has passed away. The Dane Peter Naur, who turned 87, received the Turing Award in 2005 for his contribution to the design of programming languages in general.

His death was announced through a Facebook post from the University of Copenhagen. Naur is the ‘N’ in BNF, the Backus-Naur-Form for representing the exact structures of programming languages. BNF stems from the work of the Dane on Algol 60, the version of the programming language that became available in 1960. Algol 60 was among other things the inspiration for the later programming language Pascal.

The Dane received the Turing Award in 2005 for his contribution to the development of programming languages. The Turing Award jury also calls his 1985 paper ‘Programming as theory building’ the starting point for the current development of Agile.