Sir Charles Antony Richard HoareFRS FREng^[3](born 11 January 1934),^[4] is a British computer scientist. He developed the sorting algorithmquicksort in 1959/1960.^[5] He also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the occam programming language.

Apologies

Speaking at a software conference called QCon London in 2009, he apologised for inventing the null reference:

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

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