C. A. R. Hoare
From BillionQuotes
(Redirected from Charles Antony Richard Hoare)
Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, born January 11, 1934) is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm.
- "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
- Known as "Hoare's Dictum" about computer programming
- "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
- About Algol 60: 'Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.' - from: Hints on Programming Language Design - December 1973
- "The Emperor's Old Clothes", Turing Award Lecture (1980)
- About Fortran: "On October 11, 1963, my suggestion was to pass on a request of our customers to relax the ALGOL 60 rule of compulsory declaration of variable names and adopt some reasonable default convention such as that of FORTRAN. […] The story of the Mariner space rocket to Venus, lost because of the lack of compulsory declarations in FORTRAN, was not to be published until later."
- About Algol 60: "Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their language and enabled me to describe my invention so elegantly to the world."
- About Algol W: "It was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL[…] I was astonished when the working group, consisting of all the best known international experts of programming languages, resolved to lay aside the commissioned draft on which we had all been working and swallow a line with such an unattractive bait."
- About Algol 68: 'The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "… as a tool for the creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure."'
- About PL/I: "[…] At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
- About Pascal: "That is the great strength of PASCAL, that there are so few unnecessary features and almost no need for subsets. That is why the language is strong enough to support specialized extensions--Concurrent PASCAL for real time work, PASCAL PLUS for discrete event simulation, UCSD PASCAL for microprocessor work stations"
- About Ada: "For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past."
