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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#171

Post by frognumber »

nottorp wrote: post #126
kragen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

Sort of and sort of not.

The key thing about 2023-era asynchronous versus 1995-era cooperative multitasking is code readability and conciseness.

Under the hood, I'm expressing the same thing, but Windows 3.1 code was not fun to write. Python / JavaScript, once you wrap your head around it, is. The new semantics are very readable, and rapidly improving too. The old ones were impossible to make readable.

You could argue that it's just syntactic sugar, but it's bloody important syntactic sugar.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#172

Post by wormius »

RIP King. 2nd language I learned was Pascal (Turbo 5 then 6) in high school. Tried UCSD P-System from a family friend with corporate/educational connections on 5.25" but didn't have a manual, and this was before the internet. I could/should have tried to use the library to get books about it, but gave up.

Fond memories; I feel like the 90s kids were the last ones to really get to appreciate Pascal in a "native" (supportive, institutional) setting.

I also loved learning Oberon/Bluebottle (now A2 I guess), which I was so fascinated with. I think that and Plan 9's textual/object interface environments are super interesting and a path we could have taken (may converge to someday?)

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#174

Post by boznz »

kloch wrote: post #46
khazhoux wrote: post #13

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardwa…

Pascal was the second language I learned after Fortran. I didn't particularly like Fortran but Pascal really hit home and motivated me to learn C.

Love motivated me to learn Pascal, Money motivated me to learn C.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#176

Post by alanbernstein »

rabbits77 wrote: post #148
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".

"worth" alone still means "value" though

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#177

Post by rollcat »

kragen wrote: post #136
rollcat wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

who are today's new great minimalists?

In no particular order: 100r.co, OpenBSD (& its many individual contributors such as tedu or JCS), Suckless/9front, sr.ht, Alpine, Gemini (&gopher) & all the people you can find there, Low Tech Magazine, antirez, Fabrice Bellard, Virgil Dupras (CollapseOS), & many other people, communities, and projects - sorry I don't have a single comprehensive list, that's just off the top of my head ;)

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#178

Post by zengid »

sedatk wrote: post #169
bsimpson wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK, even Photoshop was originally written in Pascal.

It was, according to Sean Parent (Adobe employee) in an interview about Pascal (around 8:03): https://adspthepodcast.com/2023/12/29/Episode-162.html

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#180

Post by bb88 »

tommsy64 wrote: post #97
omoikane wrote: post #39

Niklaus Wirth was also responsible for changing the title of Dijkstra's paper to "Goto Statement Considered Harmful". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful#cite_ref-6

Relevant excerpt of Dijkstra's own account (from EWD1308 [1]): Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a templa…

And it continues to this day!
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