His A Guide to Fortran Programming (Wiley, 1961) and its successors were the standard textbooks on that language for over two decades.
McCracken was born in 1930 in Hughesville, Judith Basin County, Montana, a mining town, and graduated in 1951 from Central Washington University with degrees in mathematics and chemistry.
[1] He worked seven years with the General Electric Company in computer applications and programmer training.
After that, he worked at the New York University Atomic Energy Commission Computer Center, and was a graduate student at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
In 1970 he earned a Master of Divinity degree from the Union Theological Seminary in New York.