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John Backus Quotes

1924–2007 United States

John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist and winner of the 1977 Turing Award. He led the team that invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax.

United States
Academics
Computer scientists
Mathematicians

Random John Backus quote

2 quotes

APL is the first language not based on the lambda calculus that is not word-at-a-time and uses functional programming forms.
Unfortunately, however, APL still splits programming into a world of expressions and a world of statements. Thus the effort to write one-line programs is partly motivated by the desire to stay in the world of expressions.

You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work .

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Backus (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.