Hoare And Co Quotes & Sayings

The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code. — Tony Hoare

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity. — Tony Hoare

I have been giving the best of my advice to this project since 1975. At first I was extremely hopeful. The original objectives of the language included reliability, readability of programs, formality of language definition, and even simplicity. Gradually these objectives have been sacrificed in favor of power, supposedly achieved by a plethora of features and notational conventions, many of them unnecessary and some of them, like exception handling, even dangerous ...
It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use. The sponsors of the language have declared unequivocally, however, that there shall be no subsets. This is the strangest paradox of the whole strange project. If you want a language with no subsets, you must make it small. — C.A.R. Hoare

Dane lived above a greengrocer's shop at 26 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, with her secretary, Olwen Bowen, herself a writer of children's books, but who now devoted herself to the care of her companion. 'One climbed up a rickety staircase and there was Winifred, surrounded by her paintings, sculptures, a piano and goodness knows how many books, where she would give many after-the-theatre parties . . . — Philip Hoare

The trouble with the world is, Frankie, that there are too many ideals and too little horse sense . . . Human beings don't like peace and good will and everybody loving everybody else . . . they're not made like that. Human beings like eating and drinking and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who'll give 'em half a chance. — Philip Hoare

Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out. — Tony Hoare

There are two ways of constructing a piece of software: One is to make it so simple that there are obviously no errors, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors. — Tony Hoare

I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran. — Tony Hoare

The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user. — C.A.R. Hoare

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it ... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution. — Tony Hoare

It is easy to predict that some of the discoveries of research directed towards Grand Challenges - but only the most unexpected ones, and at the most unexpected times - will be the basis of revolutionary improvements in the way that we exploit the power of our future computing devices. — Tony Hoare

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind. — Tony Hoare

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells ... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers. — Tony Hoare

I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist - probably to be found working in universities - who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale. — C.A.R. Hoare

The job of formal methods is to elucidate the assumptions upon which formal correctness depends. — Tony Hoare

I conclude that 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. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. It also requires a willingness to accept objectives which are limited by physical, logical, and technological constraints, and to accept a compromise when conflicting objectives cannot be met. No committee will ever do this until it is too late. — C.A.R. Hoare

Some problems are better evaded than solved. — Tony Hoare

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. — C.A.R. Hoare

The sea defines us, connects us, separates us. Most of us experience only its edges, our available wilderness on a crowded island - it's why we call our coastal towns 'resorts', despite their air of decay. And although it seems constant, it is never the same. One day the shore will be swept clean, the next covered by weed; the shingle itself rises and falls. Perpetually renewing and destroying, the sea proposes a beginning and an ending, an alternative to our landlocked state, an existence to which we are tethered when we might rather be set free. — Philip Hoare

What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? What is the linking thread which gathers these disparate branches into a single discipline. My answer to these questions is simple -it is the art of programming a computer. It is the art of designing efficient and elegant methods of getting a computer to solve problems, theoretical or practical, small or large, simple or complex. It is the art of translating this design into an effective and accurate computer program. — Tony Hoare

But to me, each revision of the document simply showed how far the initial Flevel implementation had progressed. Those parts of the language that were not yet implemented were still described in free-flowing flowery prose giving promise of unalloyed delight. In the parts that had been implemented, the flowers had withered; they were choked by an undergrowth of explanatory footnotes, placing arbitrary and unpleasant restrictions on the use of each feature and loading upon a programmer the responsibility for controlling the complex and unexpected side-effects and interaction effects with all the other features of the language. — C.A.R. Hoare

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors. — Tony Hoare

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. — Tony Hoare

I was eventually persuaded of the need to design programming notations so as to maximize the number of errors which cannot be made, or if made, can be reliably detected at compile time. — Tony Hoare

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. — Tony Hoare

I think actually if you take the analogy with other areas of engineering, and increasingly of science and even mathematics, you can see people do not have to learn the vast number of formulae they used to learn. Instead, they have to learn to use the computer effectively. This frees them, I feel, to understand concepts and the foundations while they're learning the mechanics of the application of the theory. — C.A.R. Hoare

Books to enthral as well as entertain — Keith Hoare

dolphins are not the benevolent mammals we'd like them to be; those beaming faces hide the minds of assassins. — Philip Hoare

In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore, for the time being, their differences. — Tony Hoare

John Gielgud thought 'he was never the same after leaving England, though he wouldn't have admitted it. I think that tax business, and the way people reacted to it, shocked him . . . He wasn't much good as a tax exile. He didn't do a lot with his money. His houses were commonplace, the food dreadful, the decoration pretty amateurish. — Philip Hoare