Tony Hoare, one of the greatest British computer scientists, has died at 92. Best known for inventing the Quicksort algorithm in 1959, Hoare also created Hoare logic for formal program verification, and the Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) model that influenced concurrency in languages like Go, Erlang, and Clojure. He won the Turing Award in 1980. He is also remembered for coining the term 'The Billion Dollar Mistake' for null references, a feature he introduced in ALGOL W and later deeply regretted. His background was unusually broad, starting with a classics degree at Oxford before pivoting to computing after studying machine translation in Moscow.
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