By C.A.R. Hoare
Communications of the ACM, 1981
My first and most pleasant duty in this lecture is to express my profound gratitude to the Association for Computing Machinery for the great honor which they have bestowed on me and for this opportunity to address you on a topic of my choice. What a difficult choice it is! My scientific achievements, so amply recognized by this award, have already been amply described in the scientific literature. Instead of repeating the abstruse technicalities of my trade, I would like to talk informally about myself, my personal experiences, my hopes and fears, my modest successes, and my rather less modest failures. I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article and now I would like you to learn from them, too. Besides, failures are much more fun to hear about afterwards; they are not so funny at the time.
I start my story in August 1960, when I became a programmer with a small computer