The FORTRAN automatic coding system

By J. Backus, R. J. Beeber, S. Best, R. Goldberg, L. Haibt, H. L. Herrick, R. A. Nelson, D. Sayre, P. Sheridan, H. Stern and 3 more. 1899

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Semantics of probabilistic programs (1979, background): “However, high-level probabilistic languages have been in use since the earliest versions of FORTRAN (Backus et al. (1957)) and BASIC (see Kurtz (1978)), both of which had a random number facility.”
Learning to Represent Programs with Property Signatures (2020, background): “Program synthesis is a longstanding goal of computer science research (Manna & Waldinger, 1971; Waldinger et al., 1969; Summers, 1977; Shaw; Pnueli & Rosner, 1989; Manna & Waldinger, 1975), arguably dating to the 1940s and 50s (Copeland, 2012; Backus et al., 1957).”