John Backus Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of John Backus's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Computer Scientist John Backus's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 4 quotes on this page collected since December 3, 1924! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
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  • You need the willingness to fail all the time.

  • I, myself, have had many failures and I've learned that if you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be -you aren't stretching your imagination.

  • They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize - that's all they want you to do. You must not think.

    School   Thinking   Want  
  • Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

    Writing   Lazy   Computer  
    IBM employee magazine "Think", 1979.
  • Much of my work has come from being lazy.

  • 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.

    Ideas   Doe   Needs  
  • Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

    "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?". John Backus' 1977 Turing Award lecture, published in "Communications of the ACM", Volume 21, No. 8 (pp. 639-640), August 1978.
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We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 4 quotes from the Computer Scientist John Backus, starting from December 3, 1924! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
John Backus quotes about:

John Backus

  • Born: December 3, 1924
  • Died: March 17, 2007
  • Occupation: Computer Scientist