“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.”
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.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“A crude measure of the simplicity of an engineering tool is the length of the manual required to give a full and complete account of how to use it and avoid misusing it.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“I realised that both verification and testing were using the same technology—assertions—on a common goal of improving software products in their speed of delivery, their quality, and their reliability.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“Computer programming is like doing crossword puzzles, and being paid for it”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“Most problems in real life are poorly understood, in that the real problem is often something different from what it is orginally thought to be.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.”
— Tony Hoare Secondary source“In all branches of commerce and industry, history shows dramatic reduction in the error rates when their cost is brought back from the customer to the perpetrator.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“Above all, I did not allow anything to be done which I did not myself understand. It worked!”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“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 Primary source“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 Primary source“The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“In all spheres of human intellectual and practical activity, from carpentry to golf, from sculpture to space travel, the true craftsman is the one who thoroughly understands his tools.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“In the development of our understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“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 Primary source“All advances in engineering are tested first on small-scale models, in wave tanks, or in wind tunnels. Without models, the research would be prohibitively expensive, and progress would be correspondingly slow.”
— Tony Hoare Primary source“Many computer programs of the present day are of inordinate size—many thousands of pages of closely printed text. Mathematics has no tradition of dealing with expressions on this scale.”
— Tony Hoare Primary sourceLouis Pasteur Albert Einstein Henry David Thoreau Vilfredo Pareto Carl Jacobi