151–160 of 412 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
He had the crowd laughing and cheering, and the audience questions in the end were absolutely excellent.
"Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" was a seminal book for me when I was learning about software development and it has influenced how I think about programming. Also, Pascal (in its various dialects) was my main language for many years on multiple platforms (CP/M, MS-DOS, Windows).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
>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…
In short, compiler is not an ideal representation of the user programs it needs to optimize.
I loved the book Compiler Construction. Wirth's emphasis on minimalism is a huge inspiration.
I couldn't find it available for download anywhere, but Internet Archive has a version of it in the library that can be checked out for free: https://archive.org/details/modelimplementat0000wels/page/n9...
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."
He was the go to guy for witty comments.
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.