alt Hacker NewsOne of the greats. Invented quicksort and concurrent sequential processes. I always looked up to him because he also seemed very humble.
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embit • today at 3:45 PM
Talking about Quicksort, John Bentley’s deep dive in Quicksort is quite illuminating. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvgYAQzg1z8
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madsohm • today at 3:53 PM
They were never concurrent, they were communicating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...
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wood_spirit • today at 3:19 PM
And regretful inventor of the null reference!
His “billion dollar mistake”:
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...
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He also invented many other things, like enumeration types, optional types, constructors. He popularized the "unions" introduced by McCarthy, which were later implemented in ALGOL 68, from where a crippled form of them was added to the C language.
Several keywords used in many programming languages come from Hoare, who either coined them himself, or he took them from another source, but all later programming language designers took them from Hoare. For example "case", but here only the keyword comes from Hoare, because a better form of the "case" statement had been proposed first by McCarthy many years earlier, under the name "select".
Another example is "class" which Simula 67, then all object-oriented languages took from Hoare, However, in this case the keyword has not been used first by Hoare, because he took "class", together with "record", from COBOL.
Another keyword popularized by Hoare is "new" (which Hoare took from Wirth, but everybody else took from Hoare), later used by many languages, including C++. At Hoare, the counterpart of "new" was "destroy", hence the name "destructor", used first in C++.
The paper "Record Handling", published by C.A.R. Hoare in 1965-11 was a major influence on many programming languages. It determined significant changes in the IBM PL/I programming language, including the introduction of pointers . It also was the source of many features of the SIMULA 67 and ALGOL 68 languages, from where they spread in many later programming languages.
The programming language "Occam" has been designed mainly as an implementation of the ideas described by Hoare in the "Communicating Sequential Processes" paper published in 1978-08. OpenMP also inherits many of those concepts, and some of them are also in CUDA.