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, Think (1979)

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17704662/

Quoted in IBM's employee magazine Think (1979); cited by his AP obituary.

Topics: programming, software design