Quicksort inventor Tony Hoare dies at 92

"He is best known as the inventor of the Quicksort algorithm. He invented it in 1959 and implemented it at Elliott Computers in 1960 for a bet with his boss, as recounted in this lovely personal reminiscence by Jim Miles. Depending on how ordered the data you need to sort is, an incredible two-thirds of a century later it's still one of the fastest ways to sort data."

"Quicksort (and its related Quickselect algorithm) was not Hoare's only claim to fame by far. A decade later, he devised Hoare logic, based on the Hoare triple, an important tool in reasoning about, and formally verifying, programs. A decade on from that, he published what he called the Communicating Sequential Processes model, which now guides how programming languages including Clojure, Erlang, and Go handle concurrent operations."

"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."

C. A. R. Hoare, known as Tony to friends, was a legendary computer scientist who died at age 92. He invented Quicksort in 1959, implementing it at Elliott Computers in 1960 as a bet with his boss. The algorithm remains one of the fastest sorting methods nearly 65 years later, used in Unix and various programming language libraries. Beyond Quicksort, Hoare developed Hoare logic and the Hoare triple for formal program verification, and created the Communicating Sequential Processes model that influences concurrent programming in languages like Clojure, Erlang, and Go. He won the Turing Award in 1980 and was renowned for insightful quotes about programming and software design.

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