[5] He entered college at the University of Virginia to study chemistry, but struggled with his classes there, and he was expelled after less than a year for poor attendance.

[7] He was subsequently conscripted into the U.S. Army during World War II,[5] and eventually came to hold the rank of corporal, being put in command of an anti-aircraft battery stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

[7] He soon underwent a second operation to replace the metal plate in his head with one of his own design,[9] and received an honorable medical discharge from the U.S. Army in 1946.

This widely used language made computers practical and accessible machines for scientists and others without requiring them to have deep knowledge of the machinery.

A few deviations from this approach were tried (notably in Lisp and APL), but by the 1970s, Backus–Naur context-free specifications for computer languages had become quite standard, following the development of automated compiler generators such as yacc.

[1] Sometimes viewed as Backus's apology for creating Fortran, this paper did less to garner interest in the FP language than to spark research into functional programming in general.

FL was at odds with functional programming languages being developed in the 1980s, most of which were based on the lambda calculus and static typing systems instead of, as in APL, the concatenation of primitive operations.