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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#31

Post by lukego »

Besides all his innumerable accomplishments he was also a hero to Joe Armstrong and a big influence on his brand of simplicity.

Joe would often quote Wirth as saying that yes, overlapping windows might be better than tiled ones, but not better enough to justify their cost in implementation complexity.

RIP. He is also a hero for me for his 80th birthday symposium at ETH where he showed off his new port of Oberon to a homebrew CPU running on a random FPGA dev board with USB peropherals. My ambition is to be that kind of 80 year old one day, too.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#32

Post by wiz21c »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #19

Besides his contribution to language design, he authored one of the best puns ever. His last name is properly pronounced something like "Virt" but in the US everyone calls him by "Worth". That led him to quip, "In Europe I'm called by name, but in the US I'm called by value."

Best CS pun ever. Thanks for sharing !!!

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#33

Post by 082349872349872 »

FpUser wrote: post #29
pjmlp wrote: post #21

A sad day for the history of computing, the loss of a great language designer, that influenced many of us in better ways to approach systems programming.

It is sad but the guy had long and fulfilling life many can only dream about. I would raise a toast to that. Hopefully he is in a coding Valhalla.

Not just coding: he was also interested* in hardware and built whole machines.

(* might Carver Mead describe him as a metaphorical "tall, thin, person"?)

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#34

Post by bcantrill »

adamnemecek wrote: post #22
kleiba wrote: post #16

@HN: Black banner, please?

If there was ever a reason for one, this is it.

Perhaps perversely (or maybe just a reflection of my own middle age?), but the HN black bar is one of my favorite aspects of HN. Death rites are essential, but their significance is often lost on the young who (naturally) pervade tech; what HN has developed in the black bar is really perfect.

Anyway: I trust we're just seeing natural human latency here, but this clearly merits the HN black bar. RIP, Nik Wirth -- truly one of the giants, and someone whose work had a tremendous personal influence for so many of us!

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#40

Post by abc_lisper »

My very first language was Pascal. I have since forgotten it, but distinctly remember the feeling computers are fun! And the red pascal book. Thank you Niklaus, for all the fun and impact you had on subsequent languages.
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