John Backus Quotes

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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

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

John Backus

John Backus

Born: December 3, 1924

Died: March 17, 2007 (aged 82)

Bio: John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form, a widely used notation to define formal language syntax.

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