Tony Hoare Quotes

#1. The job of formal methods is to elucidate the assumptions upon which formal correctness depends.

Tony Hoare

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.

Tony Hoare

#7. You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.

Tony Hoare

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.

Tony Hoare

#12. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay.

Tony Hoare

#13. Some problems are better evaded than solved.

Tony Hoare

#14. 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

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

Tony Hoare

#16. 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

#17. The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

Tony Hoare

#18. 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