Turing Award winner Tony Hoare, inventor of Quicksort, dies aged 92

Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare, known as Tony, has died at the age of 92. He invented the Quicksort algorithm after a bet with his boss, devised Hoare logic for assessing program correctness, and co-designed ALGOL W, which later became the basis for Pascal.

Hoare won the Turing Award in 1980 and used his lecture, The Emperor's Old Clothes, to criticise overly complex software and urge a focus on simplicity and security. He was also known for aphorisms, including his 1973 quip about ALGOL-60: 'Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors,' and his oft-quoted line contrasting two ways of constructing software design: 'One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.' Hoare was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1934.

Sri Lanka, Colombo

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