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Comment by Plasmoid | Hacker News Reader

Fun story - at Oxford they like to name buildings after important people. Dr Hoare was nominated to have a house named after him. This presented the university with a dilemma of having a literal `Hoare house` (pronounced whore).

I can't remember what Oxford did to resolve this, but I think they settled on `C.A.R. Hoare Residence`.

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There's the Tony Hoare Room [1] in the Robert Hooke Building. We held our Reinforcement Learning reading group there.

[1] https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jennifer.watson/tonyhoare.htm...

I had countless lectures and classes there

>our Reinforcement Learning reading group there //

Anyone else, like me, imagining ML models embodied as Androids attending what amounts to a book club? (I can't quite shake the image of them being little CodeBullets with CRT monitors for heads either.)

The CB reference is appreciated, he isn't talked about enough here

Our Graphics Lab at University used to be in an old house opposite a fish and chip shop. The people at the fish and chip shop were suspicious of our lab as all they saw was young men (mostly) entering and leaving at all hours of the night. We really missed an opportunity to name it "Hoare House" after one of our favourite computer scientists.

I was awarded the CAR Hoare prize from university, which is marginally better than the hoare prize I suppose

Cowards.

Shame the university takes itself so seriously. The illustrative example of overloading would have been pertinent to his subject of expertise.

I mean, I like puns but they're a flash in the pan. Jokes get old after a while and you don't want to embed them in something fairly permanent like a building name.

"Surely you've all heard of the Hoare house on campus?" seems like a pretty timeless way to a) keep people from dozing off during that bit of lecture b) cause a whole bunch of people to remember who this guy was and what he did.

This particular word for the oldest profession goes back to Old English. I am fairly sure it would outlive the building.

If the problem is when the joke lives on amusing undergrads long after you've tired of it, that just makes it worse.

Wait until they hear about what Magpie Lane in Oxford used to be called.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magpie_Lane,_Oxford

A historical bawdy pun is one of the most Oxfordian things I can think of. If we can incorporate a man in drag, we're in real business.

"Hoare House" would trigger millions of idiots, from rude little children to pontifying alpha ideologues. In perpetuity.

The University was correct in saying "nope" to the endless distractions, misery, and overhead of having to deal with that.

Imagine being a world-famous computer scientist and dying and one of the top threads in a discussion of your life is juvenile crap about how your name sounds like "whore".

Imagine being an adult human but not being able to extract a tiny chuckle from such a silly thing.

Well, I do have a rather special last name which makes me susceptible.

Chill out, I doubt he would've minded and humorous anecdotes are great ways to grieve

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