Talk:Tony Hoare

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Knighthood[edit]

The article is not clear on whether the subject is KBE, MBE, CBE, &c. as per Order of the British Empire, which I think is an important detail to add. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.251.27.222 (talk) 04:58, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Misattributed Quotation[edit]

The article said:

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." (This quote has also been attributed to Donald E. Knuth and Robert Floyd.)

The quotation has been attributed to Knuth because it was written by Knuth. It appears in his article Structured Programming with GO TO Statements that appeared in ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 6, No. 4, December 1974, p. 268. A more complete version is:

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

-- Dominus 14:27, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

On further investigation, I find that Knuth does attribute the "premature optimization" aphorism to Hoare. (Although not, obviously, the particular statement of it quoted above.) See Knuth's 1989 paper The Errors of TeX, section F:

(But I also knew, and forgot, Hoare's dictum that premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.)

-- Dominus 02:03, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I don't know whether it's worth adding but we was just given an honorary degree by Queen Mary, University of London today.

GalaxiaGuy 4 July 2005 22:12 (UTC)

Most commonly-used algorithm?[edit]

The article claims:

[He] is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm, and perhaps even the world's most widely used algorithm of any kind, in 1960.

On what grounds is it "the world's most widely used algorithm of any kind"? Is it really more commonly used than, say, matrix multiplication, or floating point addition, etc? Neilc 05:04, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You need to re-read the quotation. The author says "the world's most widely used SORTING algorithm," which is probably correct.

Apparently there was a crack in this person's screen, such that the end of the quotation was not visible. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.108.225.155 (talk) 02:17, 4 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'd be actually surprised if quicksort was the most-widely used sorting algorithm. In some cases it might be the best choice but there are other sorting algorithms (merge sort, heap sort) which in many aspects outscore quicksort. Python and Java seem to rely on timsort (a mergesort variant) as their standard sorting algorithm, as mentioned [here]. Anyway, if this sentence is to stand (I guess I've criticised it enough), it should be backed up with some sources. Alfe (talk) 16:18, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Time in Russia[edit]

On the one occasion that I spoke to Tony he told me that the atmosphere changed dramatically after he the U-2 incident ... so that's why I've included that because it clearly affected him.

When I knew (of) him he was nearly 70 and attending the gym regularly ... he also wore a Panama hat ... Panama hat + public school + Classics at Oxbridge + Royal Navy national service + time spent in Russia + knighthood, I also asked him if he'd ever been approached to do espionage work, but he said he hadn't ... but I guess he would hardly have said yes if he had!

User:Lawrennd 29 July 2005

Date of Quicksort[edit]

The article claims that quicksort was invented in 1960. Here it is claimed it was in 1961: http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/14/4/391 Who are right ?

Pronunciation of name[edit]

The pronunciation of Hoare's name would make a nice addition to the article. 12.159.141.30 16:50, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, yea. I always have been saying Car Whore in my mind128.61.171.50 (talk) 15:09, 19 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The pronunciation given in IPA (/hoʊɑːreɪ/) and in respelling (hoh-rah-ay) do not agree. If the IPA pronunciation is correct, the respelled pronunciation should be "hoh-ray". --ABehrens (talk) 19:27, 4 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject class rating[edit]

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 05:53, 8 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Root of all evil" quote[edit]

Hello, I placed some dubious tags around the note that says that the quote is due to Hoare. Although it is often attributed to Hoare, it is more often attributed to Knuth, and while there is evidence of Knuth having actually said it, there is none of Hoare having done so. I just spent the last hour or so trying to look it up; see [1]. Suggestions? shreevatsa (talk) 00:32, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:C._A._R._Hoare#Misattributed_Quotation - Francis Tyers · 17:01, 22 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I read the link. Sounds like it would make an interesting article in itself, Premature optimisation is the root of all evil perhaps? - Francis Tyers · 17:03, 22 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Humorous poem[edit]

The following poem was in circulation amongst students of computer science in the UK in the mid 80s: 

Charles Antony Richard Hoare
All his books are such a bore
The latest is the worst of his
Communicating Sequential Processes  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.57.150 (talk) 21:34, 14 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Biography[edit]

What does this mean: "He remained an extra year at Oxford studying graduate-level statistics, and following his National Service in the Royal Navy (1956–1958)."? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.46.180 (talk) 19:58, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, indeed: It would be interesting to have more-detailed information about his postgraduate studies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.135.222.16 (talk) 13:31, 12 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Birthdate citation[edit]

The citation for his birthday is a broken link (it redirects to the page for that section of the newspaper). Does someone have a proper link or another source? --2607:4000:200:13:F24D:A2FF:FE0C:A99E (talk) 01:19, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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Null-reference apology[edit]

We cannot cite Hoare's "apology" as-is in this article because that would indirectly imply that it is true, meaningful, and reasonable. However, that is not the case; it is simply not true that the null reference was introduced into software development or into computer science by Hoare. He exaggerated extremely when he made that claim.

Hoare claims that:

This [the invention of the null reference into ALGOL W] has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

The problem with this claim is that (a) it says that Hoare not only introduced the null reference, but invented it, and that (b) it implies that basically the whole world had a look at ALGOL W and said "let's import this null concept from ALGOL W to everywhere else". However, both statements are not true, both historically and technically:

  • Yes, Hoare introduced the null reference into ALGOL W, which was an object-oriented language which does not necessarily require null references, and so his "blunder" was to introduce the null reference into ALGOL W without the explicit need to do so.
  • However, the null reference in ALGOL W was not an "invention" by Hoare or a "new concept". In fact, it was nothing but a number (in this case, 0) stored in a memory cell indicating the absence of a type instance, which was a concept that was already being used all over the place by all kinds of programming languages and people, simply because in the old days, you just had no other way to do it. Many programming languages back in the day were very primitive (e.g., Fortran), so you had to encode your semantics manually by mere numbers like 0 or -1.
  • Stronger type systems were being developed in order to overcome this low-level way of programming (using null references etc), not to introduce them. The whole point why Hoare and his colleagues were working on languages like ALGOL was to create stronger type systems where you did not have to encode everything with just numbers. Meaning: the concept of using 0, -1 etc to indicate absence was already there and in use, so Hoare didn't invent it.
  • Also, in later languages like C (which is neither an object-oriented nor an object-based language), the numbers 0 and -1 are traditionally used by the programmer (not the language itself!) to indicate the absence of meaningful data. This is not a nod to ALGOL W or Tony Hoare, but just the natural way to encode your program's state if you don't have a strong type system at hand.
  • Also, ALGOL W was never adopted by the software development world on a broad basis.

So, I can only speculate why Hoare had the deranged idea to have this talk where he says he personally is responsible for billions of dollars pain and damage. Be it as it may, I intend to remove this paragraph from the article. ʘχ (talk) 11:37, 10 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The idea (and name) of null was fundamental to Lisp, published in 1960, with which Hoare was almost certainly familiar.
I followed through on theta chi's threat and deleted the bald statement that Hoare invented the null pointer. Probably the quote should go, too, but it's fun so I left it, clearly marked as hyperbole. Mdmi (talk) 02:15, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

C A R Hoare or Tony Hoare[edit]

During undergradute studies, we were introduced to the inventor of QuickSort as C A R Hoare. Why is this page titled Tony Hoare? Is Tony is an alias? If yes, shouldn't the page be using his original name? HemaChandra88 (talk) 05:43, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As long as the page is consistent about using Tony, I think we are good. His website uses Tony and I have personally heard Tony more often than C. A. R. I did add the name CAR to first sentence in response to your note in case that helps. Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:44, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
And in keeping with British tradition, he is regularly known as "Sir Tony". Mdmi (talk) 01:32, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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