One of CS's heroes lauding another. I feel I know both author and subject better for reading this.

We are all very lucky to have lived through the foundation of a new science and new engineering over the last 50 years.

Meyer makes an important point that often gets lost: the null pointer predates Hoare. NIL existed in McCarthy's Lisp in 1959, six years before Hoare added null references to ALGOL W. The "mistake," if it was one, was already widespread.

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.