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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#91

Post by kragen »

nerpderp82 wrote: post #79
kragen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the neat/scruffy divide, which goes beyond ai, wirth was the ultimate neat, and kay is almost the ultimate scruffy, though wall outdoes him alan kay is equally great, but on some axes he is the opposite extreme from wirth: an apostle of flexibility, tolerance for error, and trying things to see what works instead of planning everything out perfectly. as sicp says > Pascal is for building pyramids—imposing, breatht…

I had wanted to interview Val Schorre [1], and looked him up on a business trip because I was close. Died 2017, seems like a righteous dude. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/venturacountystar/name/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/META_II

yeah, i wish i had had the pleasure of meeting him. i reimplemented meta-ii 3½ years ago and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the parsing problem. it's the most powerful non-turing-complete 'programming language' i've ever used

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py

(i mean i would recommend reimplementing it, not using my reimplementation; it takes a few hours or days)

after i wrote it, the acm made all old papers, including schorre's meta-ii paper, available gratis; they have announced that they also plan to make them open-access, but so far have not. still, this is a boon if you want to do this. the paper is quite readable and is at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800257.808896

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#92

Post by Decabytes »

I was just exploring Pascal last month. I've been meaning to do some more programming in it. I think it's a good compromise for someone who wants a lower level language but doesn't want to use C or C++. The FreePascal compiler also rips through thousands of lines of code a second so the compile times are really short

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#93

Post by bsimpson »

pjmlp wrote: post #23
khazhoux wrote: post #13

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardwa…

Also collaborated with Apple on Object Pascal initial design, his students on Component Pascal, Active Oberon, Zonnon, and many other research projects derived from Oberon.

For those who don't know, Pascal was what a lot of the classic Mac software was written in, before Objective-C and Swift. It grew into Delphi, which was a popular low-code option on Windows.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#94

Post by kragen »

PaulHoule wrote: post #20
kragen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, and i hope meyer would know but still, it's twitter, liable to vanish or block non-logged-in access at any moment

Since Twitter is suppressing the visibility of tweets that link outside their site I think it would be perfectly fair to block links to twitter, rewrite them to nitter, etc. There also ought to be gentle pressure on people who post to Twitter to move to some other site. I mean, even I've got a Bluesky invite now.

bluesky seems like the site for people who think that the problem with twitter was that the wrong billionaire gets to decide which ideas to suppress

(admittedly you could make the same criticism of hn; it certainly isn't decentralized and resilient against administrative censorship like usenet was)

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#95

Post by raphlinus »

Prof Wirth was a major inspiration for me as a kid. I eagerly read his book on Pascal, at the time not appreciating how unusual it was for its elegance and simplicity. I also followed with interest his development of the Oberon language and Lilith workstation. When I was 13, he gave a talk not too far away, I think it might have been Johns Hopkins, and my dad took me to it. It was a wonderful experience, he was very kind and encouraging, as I think the linked photo[1] shows.

[1]: https://mastodon.online/@raph/111693863925852135

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#96

Post by [deleted] »

khazhoux wrote: post #13

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardwa…

[deleted]

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#97

Post by tommsy64 »

omoikane wrote: post #39

Niklaus Wirth was also responsible for changing the title of Dijkstra's paper to "Goto Statement Considered Harmful". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful#cite_ref-6

Relevant excerpt of Dijkstra's own account (from EWD1308 [1]):

Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.

[1] Transcription - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1... PDF - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#98

Post by gjvc »

lukego wrote: post #31

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…

> ... 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 peripherals.

This was a fantastic talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#100

Post by frognumber »

cscheid wrote: post #89
lukego wrote: post #31

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…

> not _better enough_ Wirth was such a legend on this particular aspect. His stance on compiler optimizations is another example: only add optimization passes if they improve the compiler's self-compilation time. Oberon also, (and also deliberately) only supported cooperative multitasking.

Supported cooperative multitasking won in the end.

It just renamed itself to asynchronous programing. That's quite literally what an 'await' is.

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