"BNF itself emerged when John Backus, a programming language designer at IBM, proposed a metalanguage of metalinguistic formulas ... Whether Backus was directly influenced by Chomsky's work is uncertain."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form

I'm not sure it required Chomsky's work.

Oh, lots of stuff gets invented multiple times, when it's "in the air". Nothing special about Chomsky here. And I wouldn't see that distracting from this particular achievement.