Tony Hoare Quotes

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.

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

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

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.

Some problems are better evaded than solved.

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

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

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.