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Sad that his (and many others') dream of widespread formal verification of software never came true. He made really fundamental contributions to computer scienc
by csb6 7mo ago
Sad that his (and many others') dream of widespread formal verification of software never came true. He made really fundamental contributions to computer science but will probably be mostly known for quicksort and the quote about his "billion dollar mistake", not his decades-long program to make formal methods more tractable.
Makes me think of an anecdote where Dijkstra said that he feared he would only be remembered for his shortest path algorithm.
- hinkley 7mo agoAlmost all of the earliest cited works on concurrency management in software were authored by C A R 'Tony' Hoare. I genuinely forget he authored quicksort on the regular.
- yodsanklai 7mo agoActually, thanks to AI, this may change soon! we may be in a place where widespread formal verification is finally possible.
- alphaglosined 7mo agoIt is more widespread than you may realise. That work contributes to static analysers' data flow analysis algorithms and is very widespread, even if it's in a limited capacity. C#, gcc, clang, and even dmd, with my fast DFA engine, utilise it. We can't all be using Astrée, far too expensive ;)