Classicist, philosopher, wit, and one of the greatest British computer scientists of all time

Obit Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare has died at the age of 92. Known to many computer science students as C. A. R. Hoare, and to his friends as Tony, he was not only one of the greatest minds in the history of programming – he also came up with a number of the field's pithiest quotes.

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.

In this interview clip, he explains how he implemented it:

Youtube Video

Quicksort has been used in implementations of the Unix sort command and ...