Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Niklaus Wirth has died

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 412 posts

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#101

Post by merelysounds »

bsimpson wrote: post #93
pjmlp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn’t describe Delphi as low code, it is an IDE. Wikipedia also describes it like this[1] and does not include it in its list of low code development platforms[2].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-code_development...

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#102

Post by superluserdo »

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.

>His stance on compiler optimizations is another example: only add optimization passes if they improve the compiler's self-compilation time.

What an elegant metric! Condensing a multivariate optimisation between compiler execution speed and compiler codebase complexity into a single self-contained meta-metric is (aptly) pleasingly simple.

I'd be interested to know how the self-build times of other compilers have changed by release (obviously pretty safe to say, generally increasing).

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#103

Post by olvy0 »

Pascal was my first "real" language after Basic, learned it in the late 80s, wrote a couple of small apps for my dad in it.

Learned most of it from a wonderful book whose name I have forgotten, it had a wrench on its cover, I think?

Anyway, still rocking Pascal to this day, since I still maintain 3 moderately complex installers written with InnoSetup, which uses RemObjects Pascal as a scripting language.

4 years ago, a new guy on our team, fresh from school, who never even knew this language existed, picked up Pascal in a week, and started maintaining and developing our installers much further. He did grumble a bit about the syntax but otherwise did a splendid job. I thought that was a tribute to the simplicity of the language.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#104

Post by kragen »

frognumber wrote: post #100
cscheid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

async/await has the advantage over cooperative multitasking that it has subroutines of different 'colors', so you don't accidentally introduce concurrency bugs by calling a function that can yield without knowing that it can yield

i think it's safe to say that the number of personal computers running operating systems without preemptive multitasking is now vanishingly small

as i remember it, oberon didn't support either async/await or cooperative multitasking. rather, the operating system used an event loop, like a web page before the introduction of web workers. you couldn't suspend a task; you could only schedule more work for later

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#105

Post by mkl »

frognumber wrote: post #100
cscheid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It has mostly won for individual programs, but very much not for larger things like operating systems and web browsers.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#107

Post by frognumber »

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.

I am not very sad. Death is part of life.

I'm much more sad when life sort of decays (Alzheimer's, dementia, or simply becoming slow/stupid/decrepit), ends early, or when life is simply wasted.

He was about to turn 90.

He lead a long, impactful, fulfilling life.

That's a life to celebrate.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#108

Post by vram22 »

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…

A Wirthwhile ambition. :)

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I first wrote it as "worthwhile", but then the pun practically fell out of the screen at me.

I love Wirth's work, and not just his languages. Also his stuff like algorithms + data = programs, and stepwise refinement. Like many others here, Pascal was one of my early languages, and I still love it, in the form of Delphi and Free Pascal.

RIP, guruji.

Edited to say guruji instead of guru, because the ji suffix is an honorific in Hindi, although guru is already respectful.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#109

Post by de6u99er »

raphlinus wrote: post #95

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…

Great story. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#110

Post by forinti »

Pascal was my second language, after BASIC. I was about twelve and pointers cost me a little to understand. But the first hurdle was not having line numbers. It seemed weird.

In the end, it was definitely worth the effort, and I learnt good habits from it. I used it in college, and I suppose I kinda still do, because I do a lot of PL/SQL.

He was hugely important for generations of coders.

RIP.

Post reply on HN