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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#141

Post by pjmlp »

auselen wrote: post #137
merelysounds wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It was a RAD platform though. From following your links: > Low-code development platforms trace their roots back to fourth-generation programming language and the rapid application development tools of the 1990s and early 2000s. > Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal.

It still is, and got a new release last month.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#142

Post by nottorp »

kragen wrote: post #135
nottorp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

if the implied contrast is with cooperative multitasking, it's exactly the opposite: they're there to expose the event loop in a way you can't ignore. if the implied contrast is with setTimeout(() => { ... }, 0) then yes, pretty much, although the difference is fairly small—implicit variable capture by the closure does most of the same hiding that await does

Not asking about old JavaScript vs new JavaScript. Asking about explicit event loop vs hidden event loop with fancy names like timeout, async, await...

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#143

Post by sterlind »

bhaak wrote: post #75

I'm a former student of his. He was one of the people that made me from a teenager that hacked on his keyboard to get something to run to a seasoned programmer that thinks before he codes. Even before I met him at the university I was programming in Oberon because there was a big crowd of programmers doing Wirth languages on the Amiga. He will be missed.

which languages? I've just restored an Amiga 500 with Workbench 2.1 and I'd love to honor his memory.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#144

Post by pjmlp »

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 already told this story multiple times, when I came to learn C, I already knew Turbo Pascal since 4.0 up to 6.0, luckly the same teacher that was teaching us about C, also had access to Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS.

I adopted C++ right away as the sensible path beyond Turbo Pascal for cross-platform code, and never seen a use for C primitive and insecure code, beyond being asked to use it in specific university projects, and some jobs during the dotcom wave.

On Usenet C vs C++ flamewars, there might be still some replies from me on the C++ side.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#145

Post by _ph_ »

A sad day. He was a titan of computing and still deserved even more attention that the got. If his languages had been more prevalent in software development, a lot of things would be in a better shape.

After playing around a bit with Basic on the C64/128, Pascal became my first "real" programming language I learned. In the form of UCSD Pascal on Apple II at my school as well as Turbo Pascal 3.0 on a IBM PC (no AT or any fanciness yet). Actually a Portable PC with a build-in amber CRT.

When I got my Amiga 500, Modula 2 was a very popular language on the Amiga and actually the M2Amiga system was the most robust dev env. I still think fondly of that time, as Modula 2 made it so easy to develop structured and robust programs. The module concept was quite ahead of the time, while the C world kept recompiling header files for so many years to come. Today, Go picked up a lot from Modula 2, one reason I immediately jumped onto it. Not by chance, Robert Griesemer was a student of Wirth.

During the 90ies, while MS Dos was still used, Turbo Pascal still was the main go-to language on the PC for everyone, as it was powerful, yet approachable for non-fulltime software developers. It picked up a lot of extensions from Modula 2 too and also had a nice Object system. It peaked at the version 6 and 7. Probably to the day my favorite development environment, partially because of the unmatched speed of a pure character based UI. And Turbo Pascal combined the nice development environment with a language which found a great compromise between power and simplicity.

Unfortunately, I was only vaguely familiar with his later work on Oberon. I ran the Oberon system natively on my 386 for some toying around. It was extremely impressive with its efficiency and full GUI in the time of DOS on the PC. A pity, it didn't achive more attention. Probably it would have been very successful if it had gained tracking in the not too late 80ies, in the early 90ies of course Windows came along.

From a puristic point of view, the crowning achievement was of course when he really earned the job title of a "full stack developer", not only designing Oberon and the OS, but the CPU to run it as well. Very impressive and of a huge educational value.

END.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#146

Post by bunderbunder »

amelius wrote: post #116
superluserdo wrote: post #102

Earlier 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?

Life was different in the '80s. Oberon targeted the NS32000, which didn't have a floating point unit. Let alone most the other modern niceties that could lead to a large difference between CPU features used by the compiler itself, and CPU features used by other programs written using the compiler.

That said, even if the exact heuristic Wirth used is no longer tenable, there's still a lot of wisdom in the pragmatic way of thinking that inspired it.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#147

Post by vram22 »

kragen wrote: post #132
vram22 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

not exactly; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_multitasking

Thanks, will check that.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#148

Post by rabbits77 »

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."

The joke really only works if you use his first name! The complete joke is that "by value" means pronouncing first and last name to sound like "Nickles Worth".

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#149

Post by kragen »

nottorp wrote: post #142
kragen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the implied contrast is with cooperative multitasking, it's exactly the opposite: they're there to expose the event loop in a way you can't ignore. if the implied contrast is with setTimeout(() => { ... }, 0) then yes, pretty much, although the difference is fairly small—implicit variable capture by the closure does most of the same hiding that await does

Not asking about old JavaScript vs new JavaScript. Asking about explicit event loop vs hidden event loop with fancy names like timeout, async, await...

do you mean the kind of explicit loop where you write

    for (;;) {
        int r = GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0);
        if (!r) break;
        if (r == -1) croak();
        TranslateMessage(&msg);
        DispatchMessage(&msg);
    }
or, in yeso,

      for (;;) {
        yw_wait(w, 0);
        for (yw_event *ev; (ev = yw_get_event(w));) handle_event(ev);
        redraw(w);
      }
async/await doesn't always hide the event loop in that sense; python asyncio, for example, has a lot of ways to invoke the event loop or parts of it explicitly, which is often necessary for integration with software not written with asyncio in mind. i used to maintain an asyncio cubesat csp protocol stack where we had to do this

to some extent, though, this vitiates the concurrency guarantees you can otherwise get out of async/await. software maintainability comes from knowing that certain things are impossible, and pure async/await can make concurrency guarantees which disappear when a non-async function can invoke the event loop in this way. so i would argue that it goes further than just hiding the event loop. it's like saying that garbage collection is about hiding memory addresses: sort of true, but false in an important sense

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#150

Post by madamelic »

kragen wrote: post #123
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

Oh sorry, I misremembered the list and meant Oberon but fair point. I had just noticed that the last stable release was in 2020.

If I had read more closely to the wording, the language was _designed_ by Wirth but that doesn't necessiate him being fingers-to-keyboard (or whatever modality) despite it saying he was the developer.

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