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.

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.

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 :-)

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