Software engineers have joined the ranks of copy editors, translators, and others who fear that they're about to be replaced by generative AI. But it might be surprising to learn that coders have been under threat before. New technologies have long promised to "disrupt" engineering, and these innovations have always failed to get rid of the need for human software developers. If anything, they often made these workers that much more indispensable. To understand where handwringing about the end of programmers comes from--and why it's overblown--we need to look back at the evolution of coding and computing.

Before Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" programming language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own. The breakthrough earned Mr. Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry's highest accolades. The citation praised his "profound, influential, and lasting contributions." Mr. Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering. "Much of my work has come from being lazy," Mr. Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 11 2007 In the article below, the "whirring tapes" of IBM's latest computer in 1949 were an anachronism. Magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951. In the mid-1950s, John Backus, who has died aged 82, led a team at IBM that created a revolutionary new way to communicate with early electronic computers. They invented Fortran, the first true programming language, and in doing so laid the foundations of today's multi-billion dollar software industry. During a long career at IBM, Backus continued to seek better methods of computer programming, but his enduring legacy is Fortran, the language that is still used today to solve complex scientific problems such as weather forecasting and aircraft design.

Backus was born in Philadelphia and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Del., where he was apparently an indifferent student, according to his biographical entry in the Wikipedia. After a stint in the U.S. Army (during which he was treated for a brain tumor), Backus ended up in New York City, where he gravitated toward mathematics. Earning a master's degree in the discipline in 1949, he joined International Business Machines the following year to work on the firm's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator. The SSEC was one of the last of the large electromechanical computers ever built. It also was one of the first to run a stored program.