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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#121

Post by frognumber »

epcoa wrote: post #114
mkl wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's moving in more and more.

A core problem is that it's now clear most apps have hundreds or thousands of little tasks going, increasingly bound by network, IO, and similar. Async gives nice semantics for implementing cooperative multitasking, without introducing nearly as many thread coherency issues as preemptive.

I can do things atomically. Yay! Code literally cooperates better. I don't have the messy semantics of a Windows 3.1 event loop. I suspect it will take over more and more into all walks of code.

Other models are better for either:

- Highly parallel compute-bound code (where SIMD/MIMD/CUDA-style models are king)

- Highly independent code, such as separate apps, where there are no issues around cooperation. Here, putting each task on a core, and then preemptive, obviously wins.

What's interesting is all three are widely used on my system. My tongue-in-cheek comment about cooperative multitasking winning was only a little bit wrong. It didn't quite win in the sense of taking over other models, but it's in widespread use now. If code needs to cooperate, async sure beats semaphores, mutexes, and all that jazz.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#122

Post by kragen »

Qem wrote: post #45

RIP Mr. Wirth. The first programming language I ever learnt was Pascal, that brings me fond memories. A big loss for the computer science community.

minor quibble: dr. wirth had a doctorate from berkeley

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#123

Post by kragen »

madamelic wrote: post #77

Am I understanding correctly that he was the sole maintainer of Algol at the age of 86 years old? Or was it more supervisory / BDFL?

algol isn't a piece of software, so it doesn't have maintainers. i don't know if the algol committee ever officially disbanded but wirth had already resigned before algol 68 came out

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#124

Post by saiya-jin »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #111

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.

... and you never will, since OSes don't provide anything like that out of box and to make design ecosystem work like that, a major effort for fat clients would be needed. In a time when dev tools are mostly free (apart from intellij idea but this approach has its own drawbacks) and focused on other technologies / platforms.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#125

Post by nerpderp82 »

kragen wrote: post #83
nerpderp82 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, Henry Baker is still with us. I had a dream where I interviewed Wirth for like 20 hrs so we could clone him with an LLM. We need to grab as much video interviews from folks as possible.

henry baker has made many great contributions, but last time i talked to him, he was waiting for somebody to start paying him again in order to do any more research but i'm sure he'd agree his achievements are not in the same league as wirth's

I wasn't trying to compare them in any other way other than, that Henry Baker is still with us.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#126

Post by nottorp »

kragen wrote: post #104
frognumber wrote: post #100

Earlier 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.

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 eit…

And these fancy new names aren't there just for hiding the event loop? :)

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#127

Post by emmelaich »

I liked his witticism "You can call me by name (Veert) or call me by value (Worth)."

But I can't find a reliable attribution.

[edit - see other comment, apparently said by Adriaan van Wijngaarden not Wirth]

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#128

Post by rollcat »

kragen wrote: post #2

begin this is terrible news; is there a better source than twitter (edit: https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html thanks to johndoe0815); wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand; now only hoare and moore remain, and moore seems to have given the reins at greenarrays to a younger generation; young people may not be aware of th…

> wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand;

And yet far from the last. Simple, correct, and beautiful software is still being made today. Most of it goes unnoticed, its quiet song drowned out by the cacophony of attention-seeking, complex, brittle behemoths that top the charts.

That song never faded, you just need to tune in.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#129

Post by TremendousJudge »

scotty79 wrote: post #85
TremendousJudge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Pascal and MODULA-2 in college, in my first two programming semesters. MODULA-2 was removed shortly afterwards but Pascal is still used in the introductory programming course. I'm very happy to have had these as the languages that introduced me to programming and Wirth occupies a very special place in my heart. His designs were truly ahead of their time.

I had Pascal and some Modula as well (on concurrent programming course). I learned C++ later myself as a Pascal with bizzare syntax. I always felt like semantics of C++ was taken entirely from Pascal. No two lanuages ever felt closer to each other for me. Like one was just reskin of the other.

I learned C that way (algorithms class was in C), even had a little printout table of the different syntaxs for the same instructions (here's how you write a for, if, record, declare a variable, etc). At the time I remember thinking that the C syntax was much uglier, and that opinion has stayed with me since -- when I learned Python everything just seemed so natural.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#130

Post by vram22 »

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."

I saw it stated as pronounced as Veert, somewhere, maybe in his Wikipedia or Wikiquote pages.
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