Tony Hoare was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to British parents; his father was a colonial civil servant and his mother was the daughter of a tea planter.

[13] He returned to the University of Oxford in 1958 to study for a postgraduate certificate in statistics,[12] and it was here that he began computer programming, having been taught Autocode on the Ferranti Mercury by Leslie Fox.

[13] In 1960, Hoare left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers Ltd,[12] a small computer manufacturing firm located in London.

[23][24] Speaking at a software conference in 2009, Tony Hoare hyperbolically apologized for inventing the null reference:[25][26] I call it my billion-dollar mistake.

This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

It has turned out that the world just does not suffer significantly from the kind of problem that our research was originally intended to solve.A commemorative article was written in tribute to Hoare for his 90th birthday.