Talk:C. A. R. Hoare
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[edit] Misattributed Quotation
The article said:
- "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." (This quote has also been attributed to Donald E. Knuth and Robert Floyd.)
The quotation has been attributed to Knuth because it was written by Knuth. It appears in his article Structured Programming with GO TO Statements that appeared in ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 6, No. 4, December 1974, p. 268. A more complete version is:
- There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
-- Dominus 14:27, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
On further investigation, I find that Knuth does attribute the "premature optimization" aphorism to Hoare. (Although not, obviously, the particular statement of it quoted above.) See Knuth's 1989 paper The Errors of TeX, section F:
- (But I also knew, and forgot, Hoare's dictum that premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.)
-- Dominus 02:03, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't know whether it's worth adding but we was just given an honorary degree by Queen Mary, University of London today.
GalaxiaGuy 4 July 2005 22:12 (UTC)
[edit] Most commonly-used algorithm?
The article claims:
- [He] is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm, and perhaps even the world's most widely used algorithm of any kind, in 1960.
On what grounds is it "the world's most widely used algorithm of any kind"? Is it really more commonly used than, say, matrix multiplication, or floating point addition, etc? Neilc 05:04, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
You need to re-read the quotation. The author says "the world's most widely used SORTING algorithm," which is probably correct.
[edit] Time in Russia
On the one occasion that I spoke to Tony he told me that the atmosphere changed dramatically after he the U-2 incident ... so that's why I've included that because it clearly affected him.
When I knew (of) him he was nearly 70 and attending the gym regularly ... he also wore a Panama hat ... Panama hat + public school + Classics at Oxbridge + Royal Navy national service + time spent in Russia + knighthood, I also asked him if he'd ever been approached to do espionage work, but he said he hadn't ... but I guess he would hardly have said yes if he had!
User:Lawrennd 29 July 2005
[edit] Date of Quicksort
The article claims that quicksort was invented in 1960. Here it is claimed it was in 1961: http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/14/4/391 Who are right ?
