Tony Hoare Quotes

19 quotes in 349 categories

• 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…
• You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.
• The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay.
• Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
• The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.
• Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.
• At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software…
• We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
• 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,…
• I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.
• The job of formal methods is to elucidate the assumptions upon which formal correctness depends.
• 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…
• In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition…
• 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?…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• It is easy to predict that some of the discoveries of research directed towards Grand Challenges - but only the most unexpected ones, and at…
• 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…

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