Tony Hoare

Panel Discussion

Panel Discussion

Tony Hoare will open with a 10 minute summary of language features proposed during his career. Each feature was motivated by the desire to reduce the range of programming errors by increasing the range of errors discovered at compile-time and ensuring that those which slip through can be detected and isolated at run-time. Then he and Bruce Tate will introduce the panel and ask the language inventors to give a five minute introduction of their language answering questions like:

* Was ease of writing correct programs and debugging incorrect ones important to the market segment (ecological niche) at which your language was aimed?

* Which particular features of your language met this goal, or tried and failed?

* For what features was correctness sacrificed in the pursuit of alternative goals – eg. compactness, familiarity, compatibility, efficiency, etc?

* In the light of hindsight, what would you have done differently, and why or why not?

This will be followed by a discussion amongst inventors of languages such as F#, Erlang and Hack.

About Tony

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare is best known for the development of Quicksort, one of the world’s most widely used sorting algorithms, Hoare logic and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). He is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Honorary Member of the Cambridge University Computing Laboratory and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

Tony Hoare has won several awards for his work, including the ACM Turing Award in 1980, the Kyoto Prize for Information Science in 2000 and the John von Neumann Medal in 2011. He was knighted in 2000 for services to education and computer science.

Back to conference page