John Backus quotes

John Backus was an American computer scientist best known for leading the team that created the first widely used programming language, FORTRAN. His contributions transformed software development and made programming more accessible to scientists and engineers. He also developed the Backus-Naur Form, which influenced the syntax of modern computer languages. Here are 7 of his quotes:

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

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

Much of my work has come from being lazy.

John Backus

You need the willingness to fail all the time.

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

For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesity; as a result, the study and invention of programming languages has lost much of its excitement. Instead, it is now the province of those who prefer to work with thick compendia of details rather than wrestle with new ideas. Discussions about programming languages often resemble medieval debates about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin instead of exciting contests between fundamentally differing concepts. Many creative computer scientists have retreated from inventing languages to inventing tools for describing them. Unfortunately, they have been largely content to apply their elegant new tools to studying the warts and moles of existing languages.

John Backus