Who invented quicksort

Although, I think Professor Hoare had simplified the actual formulas for the benefit of his talk and the level of the audience. For the ordinary punter, dealing with this abstract mathematical terms is clearly out of the level of usefulness, however these are the theories that allows computer scientists to build programs such as compilers, static analysers and the tools that language writers use to build new programming languages in order to give us the world of devices and applications that we all use today.

Without these pioneers in the computer programming arena, we would be, I think, far far behind. Indeed, we are standing, everyday, on the shoulders of giants and reaching for the stars. I thoroughly enjoyed the Professor Hoare talk, and the fact that this guy is older than me and still working at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England is inspiration enough to say to hell with silo management and bad attempts to be hip with the agile practices.

Say hello to diversity in corporation, the future is for real. Here is a real star: a living legend. See the original article here. Learn the different styles of implementations could be helpful for learning data structures and algorithms.

Most textbooks describe quicksort in an imperative programming style. Below code is a Ruby version:. I was shocked when I first saw this one line quicksort in Ruby:. If you know a programming language with pattern match, it will be more simple.

Below is a Haskell implementation:. Most of the mainstream programming languages designed to primarily support imperative programming, such as C, Java, Python, etc. So many parts of the code are assigning values to variables, which will introduce side effect. There aren't many computer algorithms famous enough to get their very own birthday party, but Quicksort is one of them.

Invented by the computer scientist Tony Hoare and published in July , the algorithm's task is to put lists of things into the correct order: numbers in numerical order, words into alphabetical order, or dates into chronological oder. It does this so successfully, it is still hailed as one of the best sorting algorithms and implemented in many programming languages and libraries. The following articles explore the invention of Quicksort, how it works, and some other aspects of Tony Hoare's work.