I learned to program in Delphi and, to this day, I haven’t ever found a tool for building GUIs as pleasant. So, I’m fond of Wirth-inspired languages.
Niklaus Wirth has died
111–120 of 412 posts
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#112Earlier 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.
I always knew my experience with RISC OS wouldn't go to waste!
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Well I didn't mean to just endorse Bluesky but call it out as one of many alternatives.
I'm actually active on Mastodon but I am thinking about getting on Instagram as well because the content I post that does the best on Mastodon would fit in there.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Mostly won for CRUD apps (yes and a few others). Your DAW, your photo editor, your NLE, your chatbot girlfriend, your game, your CAD, etc might actually want to use more than one core effectively per task.
Even go had to grow up eventually.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#115I really appreciate his work. He had a full life. Since yesterday, without knowing, I was just studying a section of a book detailing the code generation of one of the first Pascal compilers for the CDC 6400.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#116Earlier 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.
>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 chan…
Hmm, but what if the compiler doesn't use the optimized constructs, e.g. floating point optimizations targeting numerical algorithms?
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#117Besides 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."
He was the go to guy for witty comments.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 chan…
Hmm, but what if the compiler doesn't use the optimized constructs, e.g. floating point optimizations targeting numerical algorithms?
probably use a fortran compiler for that instead of oberon
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Well I didn't mean to just endorse Bluesky but call it out as one of many alternatives. I'm actually active on Mastodon but I am thinking about getting on Instagram as well because the content I post that does the best on Mastodon would fit in there.
it won't surprise you to learn that i like mastodon but haven't used it in months
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#120Earlier 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.
>Supported cooperative multitasking won in the end.
Is this the same as coroutines as in Knuth's TAOCP volume 1?
Sorry, my knowledge is weak in this area.