Today, Tony Hoare is a topic of great relevance in our society. From its origins to its impact today, Tony Hoare has generated great interest among experts and the general public. Its influence has been felt in different aspects of our daily lives, from politics to the economy, including culture and technology. In this article, we will explore different aspects related to Tony Hoare, from its historical importance to its role in the contemporary world. In addition, we will analyze the different perspectives that exist around Tony Hoare, with the aim of better understanding its scope and meaning in today's society.
In 1960, Hoare left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm located in London. There, he implemented the language ALGOL 60 and began developing major algorithms.
Speaking at a software conference in 2009, Tony Hoare hyperbolically apologized for "inventing" the null reference:
I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This 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.
For many years under his leadership, Hoare's Oxford department worked on formal specification languages such as CSP and Z. These did not achieve the expected take-up by industry, and in 1995 Hoare was led to reflect upon the original assumptions:
Ten years ago, researchers into formal methods (and I was the most mistaken among them) predicted that the programming world would embrace with gratitude every assistance promised by formalisation to solve the problems of reliability that arise when programs get large and more safety-critical. Programs have now got very large and very critical – well beyond the scale which can be comfortably tackled by formal methods. There have been many problems and failures, but these have nearly always been attributable to inadequate analysis of requirements or inadequate management control. It has turned out that the world just does not suffer significantly from the kind of problem that our research was originally intended to solve.
Awards and honours
ACM Programming Systems and Languages Paper Award (1973) for the paper "Proof of correctness of data representations"
Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages". The award was presented to him at the ACM Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on 27 October 1980, by Walter Carlson, chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech was published in Communications of the ACM.
Member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) for fundamental contributions to computer science in the areas of algorithms, operating systems, and programming languages.
^Lean, Thomas (2011). "Professor Sir Tony Hoare"(PDF). National Life Stories: An Oral History of British Science. UK: British Library. Archived(PDF) from the original on 15 September 2014. Retrieved 15 September 2014.
^ abcdeLevens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900-1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 434.
^Hoare, C. A. R. (1996). "Unification of Theories: A Challenge for Computing Science". Selected papers from the 11th Workshop on Specification of Abstract Data Types Joint with the 8th COMPASS Workshop on Recent Trends in Data Type Specification. Springer-Verlag. pp. 49–57. ISBN3-540-61629-2.