Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare, known as Tony to friends, has died at the age of 92. One of the greatest programmers in the early history of computing, he invented the Quicksort algorithm after a bet with his boss, later devised Hoare logic (a system for rigorously assessing the correctness of a program), and was the co-designer of ALGOL W, a programming language that would become the basis for Pascal.
Hoare was also a deeply funny, philosophical, and self-deprecating man who had a hundred other achievements to his name. On winning the Turing Award in 1980, he delivered a lecture called The Emperor's Old Clothes in which he gave a wry look back at his career's successes and failures, and used them to bemoan overly complex software and bloated systems, urging programmers to focus on simplicity and security instead.
