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21CTO
21CTO
Mar 13, 2026 · Fundamentals

Tony Hoare: The Genius Behind Quicksort, Null References, and a Billion‑Dollar Error

Tony Hoare, Turing Award laureate and creator of Quicksort, introduced the null reference in 1965—a design later dubbed the “billion‑dollar mistake”—and spent his career advancing programming language theory, concurrency models, and formal verification, while his public apology in 2009 spurred a wave of safer language designs.

QuickSortTony Hoarealgorithm design
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Tony Hoare: The Genius Behind Quicksort, Null References, and a Billion‑Dollar Error
DeWu Technology
DeWu Technology
Dec 23, 2024 · Fundamentals

Java Null Reference Handling Principles

Java’s ubiquitous NullPointerException stems from Tony Hoare’s 1965 introduction of the null reference—a design he later called his ‘billion-dollar mistake’—and the JVM mitigates its cost by forgoing proactive checks, instead relying on OS signals like SIGSEGV to detect nulls and throw the exception only when they actually occur.

JVMJavaexception-handling
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Java Null Reference Handling Principles