John Backus quotes
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“They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize - that's all they want you to do. You must not think.”
-- John Backus -
“You need the willingness to fail all the time.”
-- John Backus -
“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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“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 -
“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 BackusSource : "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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“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.”
-- John Backus
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Source : "Broadway Favorite Aaron Tveit Tackles the Small Screen With ‘Graceland’". Interview with Suzy Evans, www.backstage.com. June 27, 2013.
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“Behind the parents stands the school, and behind the teacher the home.”
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Source : "Naţionalitatea în artă" ("Nationality in Art") by A. C. Cuza, Bucureşti: Cartea Romaneasca, 1905.
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“I want the love that cannot help but love; Loving, like God, for very sake of love.”
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Source : Joe Vitale (2010). “The Awakening Course: The Secret to Solving All Problems”, p.29, John Wiley & Sons
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“One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.”
Source : "The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons". Book by A. R. Ammons, 1990.
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“People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.”
Source : A.M. Homes (2012). “This Book Will Save Your Life”, p.29, Granta Books
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