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  jgrahamc
  In the early eighties, for example, he brought to Oxford the creators of two major formal specification languages: Cliff Jones with VDM, Jean-Raymond Abrial with Z. At Oxford, Z actually underwent a systematic rework, reminiscent of the Goethe quip reproduced above, with Frenchmen and mathematicians replaced by English mathematicians (or computer scientists). The new version enjoyed immense success in Britain, won a Queen’s Award and was used not only academically but in many mission-critical applications in industry, leading to a number of startups and work by such researchers (all having gone through Oxford at some point) as Jim Woodcock, Carroll Morgan, Jim Davies, J. Michael Spivey, Ian Hayes and Ib Holm Sørensen.This was the world I walked into in 1986 as an undergraduate studying Mathematics and Computation. I was quite quickly indoctrinated in the ways of Z notation [1] and CSP [2] and had to learn to program in ML. I still have all the lecture and class notes and they are quite fascinating to look at so many years later. Funny to read the names of celebrated researchers that I just thought of as "the person who teachers subject X". I do recall Carroll Morgan's teaching being very entertaining and interesting. And I interacted quite a bit with Jim Davies, Jim Woodcock and Mike Spivey.Having decided I wanted to stay and do a DPhil I managed to get through the interview with Tony Hoare (hardest question: "Where else have you applied to study?" answer: "Nowhere, I want to stay here") and that led to my DPhil being all CSP and occam [3]. I seem to remember we had an array of 16(?) transputers [4] that the university had managed to get because of a manufacturing problem (I think the dies were incorrecty placed making the pinouts weird, but someone had made a custom PCB for it).Imagine my delight when Go came around and I got to see CSP in a new language.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language)[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
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  mrkeen
  > First, the null pointer is essentially inevitable if you want to model the world, which has references (things containing denotations of other things).I took major exception to this. The real world doesn't have non-things, and references do not demand to refer to non-things.If your domain does actually have the concept of null, just make a type for it. Then you won't accidentally use a 6 or a "foo" where a null was demanded.
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  rswail
  One of CS's heroes lauding another. I feel I know both author and subject better for reading this.We are all very lucky to have lived through the foundation of a new science and new engineering over the last 50 years.
• tristramb
  "To explain what I was doing in logic-driven software architecture I looked for a good metaphor and, on the spot, proposed that there was a kind of “contract” between caller and callee. He did not say anything, but his mere presence had enabled me to make my incipient ideas jell."I hadn't realised that Hoare was present when Meyer first used the term 'contract' to describe his ideas.
• anon
  undefined
• hiccup
  Thank you for sharing this fantastic tribute
• password4321
  Tony Hoare has died https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324054 (2038 points, 275 comments)
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  DaleBiagio
  Meyer makes an important point that often gets lost: the null pointer predates Hoare. NIL existed in McCarthy's Lisp in 1959, six years before Hoare added null references to ALGOL W. The "mistake," if it was one, was already widespread.What made Hoare's 2009 confession so impactful wasn't that he was solely responsible — it's that he was the first person with that level of authority to publicly say "this was wrong."That's what gave Rust, Swift, and Kotlin permission to design around it.
• OpenDQV
  RIP Tony H - I am reading this article with immense gratitude for someone i never met but who has affected & benefited me.
• rramadass
  I mentioned this in the other thread on Tony Hoare;Theories of Programming: The Life and Works of Tony Hoare published by ACM in 2021 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3477355See the "preface" for details of the book - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477355.3477356Review of the above book - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365933441_Review_on...PS: You can check with some lady named "Anna" on the interweb for book access :-)
• jamesvzb
  this matches my experience exactly
• ChrisArchitect
  Another small tribute recently, latest FFmpeg 8.1 release "Hoare" following their tradition of historical-related codenaming.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47413525
• 0xWenOkx74
  [flagged]
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  hyphenatedlor90
  [flagged]