“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

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/business/20backus.html

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John Backus 4
American computer scientist 1924–2007

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