This was the world I walked into in 1986 as an undergraduate studying Mathematics and Computation. I was quite quickly indoctrinated in the ways of Z notation [1] and CSP [2] and had to learn to program in ML. I still have all the lecture and class notes and they are quite fascinating to look at so many years later. Funny to read the names of celebrated researchers that I just thought of as "the person who teachers subject X". I do recall Carroll Morgan's teaching being very entertaining and interesting. And I interacted quite a bit with Jim Davies, Jim Woodcock and Mike Spivey.

Having decided I wanted to stay and do a DPhil I managed to get through the interview with Tony Hoare (hardest question: "Where else have you applied to study?" answer: "Nowhere, I want to stay here") and that led to my DPhil being all CSP and occam [3]. I seem to remember we had an array of 16(?) transputers [4] that the university had managed to get because of a manufacturing problem (I think the dies were incorrecty placed making the pinouts weird, but someone had made a custom PCB for it).

Imagine my delight when Go came around and I got to see CSP in a new language.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

We are all very lucky to have lived through the foundation of a new science and new engineering over the last 50 years.

I took major exception to this. The real world doesn't have non-things, and references do not demand to refer to non-things.

If your domain does actually have the concept of null, just make a type for it. Then you won't accidentally use a 6 or a "foo" where a null was demanded.

Theories of Programming: The Life and Works of Tony Hoare published by ACM in 2021 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3477355

See the "preface" for details of the book - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477355.3477356

Review of the above book - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365933441_Review_on...

PS: You can check with some lady named "Anna" on the interweb for book access :-)

I hadn't realised that Hoare was present when Meyer first used the term 'contract' to describe his ideas.

What made Hoare's 2009 confession so impactful wasn't that he was solely responsible — it's that he was the first person with that level of authority to publicly say "this was wrong."

That's what gave Rust, Swift, and Kotlin permission to design around it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47413525