Skip to content

Billions Quote by Tony Hoare

“I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null…” quote by Tony Hoare — Download Open image

“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.”

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.4 out of 5 (6 ratings)

Billions Crash Damage Dollars Easy Errors Forty Lasts Null Pain Temptation Vulnerability Years

More 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,…

Image

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

Image

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…

Image

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

Image

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

Image

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship…

Image

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

Image

What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is…

Image

The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and…

Image

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

Image

Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly…

Image

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

Image

Explore all 22 Tony Hoare quotes

More Billions quotes

If I had a dollar for every time I couldn’t sleep, I could buy a billion locks and finally read a book in peace.

Image

As far as Japan is concerned, I want to help all of our allies, but we are losing billions and billions of dollars. We…

Image

The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years. Sooner or later we won’t be able to…

Image

Right now, the government is spending billions of dollars supporting the problem-makers in the U.S. economy - the polluters, despoilers, incarcerators, and warmongers.

Image

If Jesus is the Son of God in human flesh, He's one of a kind of the 13 billions of people who have ever lived.

Image

Here we were talking about economic development, about investing billions of dollars in various programs, and I could see it wasn't billions of dollars…

Image

Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to…

R. Scott Bakker

Image

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five…

Robert A. Heinlein

Image

The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred…

Image

The idea of spontaneous generation of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable even to the scale of the billions of years…

Image

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

Emile M. Cioran

Image

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the…

Benjamin Carson

Image

Browse all 1,819 Billions quotes