As every computer programmer should know, John Backus was emitted in 1924;
he gave us the BNF syntax (he is the "B"), but he also gave us that
FORTRAN obscenity... Yeah, it was a nice language at the time; the
engineers loved it, but tthe computer scientists hated it (have you ever
tried to debug a FORTRAN program that somebody else wrote?).
Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any syntax; it is
completely ad-hoc.
-- Dave