John Backus Quotes & Sayings

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. — John Backus

You need the willingness to fail all the time. — John Backus

Much of my work has come from being lazy. — John Backus

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

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. — John Backus