“I never had a doctorate, so I had to make do with Quicksort.” —Sir Tony Hoare (unpublished interview for Algorithms to Live By)

This is devastating news.

When I started university he gave a talk to all the new CompScis which as you can imagine was incredibly inspirational for an aspiring Software Engineer.

Grateful to have had that experience.

RIP

His paper on communicating processes was a great read when I was new to computer science research.

Absolutely the GOAT of concurrency. May his ring never die.

"The null reference was my billion dollar mistake responsible for innumerable errors, vulnerabilities and system crashes" (paraphrasing). I don't know. This design choice exposed the developer to system realities, and modern language approaches are based on decades of attempts to improve on it, and they are not necessarily better. Safer yes, but more weighty.

Can anyone suggest a better approach for a situation like this in the future? What's better than exposing addressing the problem with a light solution?

Rest in peace, Sir Tony Hoare

1) ACM published this book in 2021; Theories of Programming: The Life and Works of Tony Hoare - https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3477355

See the "preface" for details of the book - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477355.3477356

Review of the above book - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365933441_Review_on...

Somebody needs to contact ACM and have them make the above book freely available now; there can be no better epitaph.

2) Tony Hoare's lecture in honour of Edsger Dijkstra (2010); What can we learn from Edsger W. Dijkstra? - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/DijkstraMemorialLectures/Tony...

Somebody needs to now write a similar one for Hoare.

Truly one of the absolute greats in the history of Computer Science.

I am greatly saddened by the passing of Tony Hoare. His work has affected me deeply; in personal, academic, and professional life. Without visionaries like him, I would not find the love in computer science as I do now. It would be a great honor to have accomplished a fraction of what he did. My condolences to his close friends and family.

Assert early, assert often!

He was a professor at my old alma mater, Queen's University of Belfast. I remember hearing a story about him going to Harvard to give a lecture and, as he was presented, one of their professors referred to himself as the "Hoare of Harvard"