{"id":41659,"date":"2024-01-04T13:42:44","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T18:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=41659"},"modified":"2024-02-28T16:29:32","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T21:29:32","slug":"niklaus-wirth-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/04\/niklaus-wirth-rip\/","title":{"rendered":"Niklaus Wirth, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bertrand Meyer<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>, Slashdot<\/a>, Reddit<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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We lost a titan of programming languages, programming methodology, software engineering and hardware design. Niklaus Wirth passed away on the first of January. We mourn a pioneer, colleague, mentor and friend.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

David M Williams<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Wirth is well-remembered for his pioneering work in programming languages and algorithms. For these achievements, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1984, inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 1994, and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2004.<\/p>

They include, among many, being chief designer for the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1968), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007).<\/p>

Of these, perhaps the best-known and most used is Pascal. It was the major teaching language of introductory Computer Science courses well until the 1990s when Java, and later Python, began to take over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Mike James<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Pascal was a language that was designed specifically for teaching good programming practice.These were more innocent times and object oriented programming had not taken hold. What mattered was getting away from the unstructured mess of assembler and Fortran to a modern implementation of structured programming. Pascal, as first introduced, was a vehicle to write structured code - it had control structures that eliminated the need to use the goto. Today it looks fairly standard, but at the time many programmers hated its over-constrained fussiness. Yes, there was a big anti-structure contingent. We have come a long way since then.<\/p>

So too was it with his next language, Modula. The buzzword of the time was structured-modular programming and Modula pushed further into the encapsulation of code into modules which interacted in controlled ways. This approach developed evantually into encapsulation within the object-oriented paradigm.<\/p>

Pascal was a huge sucess in the sense that most university Computer Science departments adopted it as their main teachning language. This was a golden age because they had a language which was built to make what they were teaching clear. Compare this to todays mess of different languages each with flawed academic credentials. However Pascal only took off in the wider world when Borland introduced the world to Turbo Pascal, a much more capable and practical programming enviroment that found in the original.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Jeff Dean<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Pascal was the first language I used seriously (initially on the UCSD p-System and later via Turbo Pascal), and I got my hands on this great book that he wrote when I was in middle school.<\/p>

I also love the anecdote when asked about how to pronounce his name:<\/p>

“Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way (‘Ni-klows Wirt’), Americans invariably mangle it into ‘Nick-les Worth’. This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

See also: Introduction to Macintosh Pascal<\/a>, An Introduction to Programming Using Macintosh Pascal<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n