Oral history interview with Charles Antony Richard Hoare

Abstract

Sir Antony Hoare is Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, and Research/Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford. Hoare is the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages. He has also been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for pioneering and fundamental contributions to software science. In this oral history Hoare recounts his personal involvement in the development of academic computing science and education at The Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and at the University of Oxford. He discusses his long-time interest in building bridges between university computing science departments and industry. Hoare also details his current work at Microsoft Research in applying assertions and other scientific techniques and theory to industrial operations. He discusses his advocacy of assertions in the maintenance and transformation of legacy code. Hoare also comments on a number of other subjects, including machine translation of languages, artificial intelligence, reasoning under uncertainty, software design and reliability, and project management. The interview includes a discussion of the problem of the preservation and interpretation of code.