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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 .

— John Backus

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More quotes by John Backus

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.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Backus (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.