Another Great Old One gone

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

( the rest of the article )

(From engadget)

A personal note: John Backus was one of my heros, not only as the inventor of Fortran but as one of the co-authors of Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60 (and incidentally the inventor of the BNF notation for programming-language syntax). Algol 60 was ground-breaking all by itself, but the Report was even more so: it still stands today as one of the best pieces of technical writing in history. (The link is to the Revised Report; the Report in its original form, as PDF, can be found via the ACM, but does not appear to be available free. It should be.)

Tres Gique

Finally bought the domains tres-gique.com and tres-gique.net, and set up placeholder websites on my DSL line. (Also got the unhyphenated names tresgique.{com,net} -- they're uglier, but nobody's going to remember to type that hyphen, so they'll eventually get redirected.)

The eventual plan is for the .net site to be the group's internal working site, and the .com site to be the public site. I'm leaning toward something like ikiwiki backed by either Subversion or Git, though I could be even geekier and just use my Makefile-based site-management tools, which I'm already using for concerts on my main site.

ikiwiki has plenty of geek cred, though, and an intriguing collection of plugins.