"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."
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Academics from the United StatesDesignersPeople from PhiladelphiaComputer scientists from the United StatesMathematicians from the United States
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Quoted in the IBM employee magazine Think in 1979. Cited by his Associated Press obituary
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Backus
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John Backus
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist and winner of the 1977 Turing Award. He led the team that invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also helped to popularize function-level programming.
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