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Tony Hoare answers questions [video]
- jgrahamc 5y agoWhen I applied to do my DPhil at Oxford, Tony Hoare was the Professor of Computing and interviewed me. The hardest question he asked me was... "Where else did you apply to do research?" and I replied "Nowhere". I never found out if that was a good response or not.
- nextos 5y agoBut you got in!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kenjackson 5y agoWhat were his easy questions?
- jgrahamc 5y agoI don't remember very well but I think we might have talked about category theory and how I didn't think it was the approach I wanted to take.
- RobRivera 5y agoIt depends - but most people feel warm and fuzzy committing funds to a candidate if they know that they 'got nowhere else to go'
- julian55 5y agoHe interviewed me when I applied in the 1980s. He asked whether I what I thought of Ada which was new at the time. I was quite positive about it which was probably the wrong answer, I didn't get in.
- peteretep 5y agoI was excited to hear I was being awarded the “CAR Hoare” prize from the same institution, only to find out it was a measly £200, if we’re doing humble brags
- fredley 5y agoFor those who may not know, Tony Hoare invented Quicksort and the concept of null in computing, amongst many other fundamental things.
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoAlso Hoare logic.
- xfer 5y agoAlso CSP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...
- lou1306 5y agoAlso, monitors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_%28synchronization%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_%28synchronization%29?...
- open-source-ux 5y agoA collection of his essays was published in book form in 1989 and is freely available to download: Essays in computing science (1989): https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/63445 https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/63445 Essays discuss: Algol, Pascal, programming language design, mathematics in computing, data structures and much more.
- H8crilA 5y agoIt's not the first time I'm seeing a q&a with Hoare. Every time someone asks "but how exactly did you figure out quicksort?". He must have heard that a hundred times by now. He should come up with a fake but catchy story, like the Newton gravity apple :)
- cbsmith 5y agoHonestly, quicksort seems like a really intuitive way to do sorting, so much so that when I was in school I had to keep remembering that merge sort was the "trickier" way (to me).
- risk 5y agoI love the concept of null in computing so much and for golang channels and the most practical concurrent programming paradigm on earth there is CSP. He is a GOAT of this domain.
- chrisseaton 5y agoWhat's a GOAT?
- mikequinlan 5y agoGreatest Of All Time
- bb1234 5y agoGreatest Of All Time
- the_benno 5y agoadding some context: used most often in discussion of sports in my experience, e.g. Michael Jordan in Basketball, Wayne Gretzky in Hockey, Babe Ruth in Baseball, etc. Carries connotations not only of being one of the best to ever do it, but also a mythos and aura that influenced/continues to influence others.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jyriand 5y agoGOAT as the OG of his field
- jchallis 5y agoGOAT Of All Time We need something suitably recursive for Hoare.
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
- tosh 5y agoafaiu core.async in Clojure and channels in Go are inspired by Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) https://swannodette.github.io/2013/07/12/communicating-sequential-processes/ https://swannodette.github.io/2013/07/12/communicating-seque... https://clojure.org/news/2013/06/28/clojure-clore-async-channels https://clojure.org/news/2013/06/28/clojure-clore-async-chan... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...