26 Quotes by Tony 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

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

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.