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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#181

Post by steveklabnik »

cscheid wrote: post #89
lukego wrote: post #31

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…

> 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.

Do you happen to remember where he said that? I've been looking for a citation and can't find one.

I think that some of the text in "16.1. General considerations" of "Compiler Construction" are sorta close, but does not say this explicitly.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#182

Post by lioeters »

olvy0 wrote: post #103

Pascal was my first "real" language after Basic, learned it in the late 80s, wrote a couple of small apps for my dad in it. Learned most of it from a wonderful book whose name I have forgotten, it had a wrench on its cover, I think? Anyway, still rocking Pascal to this day, since I still maintain 3 moderately complex installers written with InnoSetup, which uses RemObjects Pascal as a scripting language. 4 years ago,…

> Pascal was my first "real" language after Basic, learned it in the late 80s

Me too, word for word. I spent a few years in my pre-teens immersed in the Turbo Pascal IDE, which was a full-on educational tool of its own that explained everything about the language. I moved on to C after that, but I still get a nostalgic vibe from looking at Pascal syntax. It was a great foundational experience for me as a programmer.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#183

Post by nottorp »

kragen wrote: post #149
nottorp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 invok…

What worries me is we may have a whole generation who doesn't know about the code you posted above and thinks it's magic or worse, real multiprocessing.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#185

Post by kragen »

rollcat wrote: post #177
kragen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

i... really don't think kris de decker is on niklaus wirth's level. i don't think he can write so much as fizzbuzz

fabrice bellard is wirth-level, it's true. not sure about tedu and jcs, because i'm not familiar enough with their work. it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare

you're comparing kindergarten finger paintings to da vinci

you said wirth was "far from the last" apostle of simplicity. definition of apostle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#186

Post by bhaak »

sterlind wrote: post #143
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.

At least several Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon-2 compilers.

My very first compiled programming language was Pascal. I got the free "PCQ Pascal" from the Fish disks as I wasn't able to get the C headers from Commodore which I would have needed for doing proper Amiga programming. Likewise later Oberon-A although I don't remember where I got that from.

There were also commercial Modula-2 and Oberon-2 compilers. I just found that the Modula-2 compiler was open sourced some years back. https://m2amiga.claudio.ch/

Aminet has directories for Oberon and Modula-2 related programs: https://aminet.net/dev/obero and https://aminet.net/dev/m2

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#187

Post by amatecha »

rollcat wrote: post #177
kragen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

uxn ftw <3

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#188

Post by kragen »

amatecha wrote: post #187
rollcat wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

uxn ftw <3

uxn is cool but it's definitely not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming; rek and devine would surely not claim it was
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