Tony Hoare

1934–2026 · British computer scientist

Topics: programming, software design, software engineering, simplicity

• The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user.

  — Tony Hoare

• [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.

  — Tony Hoare

• I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article. [...] [Failures] are much more fun to hear about afterwards; they are not so funny at the time.

  — Tony Hoare

• 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.<br

  — Tony Hoare

• [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 [Quicksort] so elegantly to the world.

  — Tony Hoare

• 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

• I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed.

  — Tony Hoare