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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#211
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'd also mention https://www.piumarta.com

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#212
post #104

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…

(To set the tone clearly - this seems like an area where you know a _lot_ more than me, so any questions or "challenges" below should be considered as "I am probably misunderstanding this thing - if you have the time and inclination, I'd really appreciate an explanation of what I'm missing" rather than "you are wrong and I am right")

I don't know if you're intentionally using "colour" to reference https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-... ? Cooperative multitasking (which I'd never heard of before) seems from its Wikipedia page to be primarily concerned with Operating System-level operations, whereas that article deals with programming language-level design. Or perhaps they are not distinct from one another in your perspective?

I ask because I've found `async/await` to just be an irritating overhead; a hoop you need to jump through in order to achieve what you clearly wanted to do all along. You write (pseudocode) `var foo = myFunction()`, and (depending on your language of choice) you either get a compilation or a runtime error reminding you that what you really meant was `var foo = await myFunction()`. By contrast, a design where every function is synchronous (which, I'd guess, more closely matches most people intuition) can implement async behaviour when (rarely) desired by explicitly passing function invocations to an Executor (e.g. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...). I'd be curious to hear what advantages I'm missing out on! Is it that async behaviour is desired more-often in other problem areas I don't work in, or that there's some efficiency provided by async/await that Executors cannot provide, or something else?

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#213
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…

I've been a massive fan of the PhD dissertation of Wirth's student Michael Franz since I first read it in '94. He's now a professor at UC Irvine, where he supervised Andreas Gal's dissertation work on trace trees (what eventually became TraceMonkey)

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#214
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…

According to his daughter (she runs a grocery store, and my wife occasionally talks to her), he kept on tinkering at home well past 80.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#215
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; now only hoare and moore remain… No. There is another. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_%28computer_s...

Some would dispute the "built for humans to understand". Whitney's work is brilliant, but it's far less accessible than Wirth's.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#216

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."

Said the same here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15361069

at the end of the comment.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#217
post #169

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.

The Photoshop 1.0.1 source code is available from the Computer History Museum https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...>

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17132058>

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#218
I bought the Art of Computer Programming volume 4A a few years ago and didn't even start reading it. 1-3 I read when I… god, my youngest child is almost that age now.

I think tonight is the time to start on 4A, before we lose Knuth too.

And as I picked it down I noticed that, almost by coincidence, AoCP stood next to Wirth's PiM2. It wasn't intentional but it feels very right. There's a set of language books that end with Systems Programming with Modula 3, the Lua book. Thinking Forth, PiM2, then a gap, then the theory-ish section starts with five volumes of Knuth. Sigh.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#219
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's pronounced with an ɪ like in "wit".

Okay, either me or the ref. may have been wrong. but I distinctly remember "Veert", because it was non-intuitive to me (as the way to pronounce Wirth), as a guy who didn't know any German at the time, only English. So the ref., probably.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, but what if the compiler doesn't use the optimized constructs, e.g. floating point optimizations targeting numerical algorithms?

Simple fix: floating-point indexes to all your tries. Or switch to base π or increment every counter by e.

That’s not a simple fix in this context. Try making it without slowing down the compiler.

You could try to game the system by combining such a change that slows down compilation with one that compensates for it, though, but I think code reviewers of the time wouldn’t accept that.

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