March 17 saw the deaths of both John Backus (via Lambda) and Tanya Reinhart (via David Pesetsky via e-mail). Backus was a computer scientist who developed FORTRAN and the Backus-Naur form for describing context-free grammars, and was an early advocate of functional (i.e. state-free) programming. Reinhart was a linguist who made many contributions to syntax, … Continue reading Backus and Reinhart, RIP