Quotations

John Backus

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.

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.

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.