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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#241

Post by usr1106 »

kragen wrote: 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…

> tex is written in pascal;

Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures https://youtu.be/jbrMBOF61e0 : If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source? Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Well, GCC (as in GNU compiler collection) probably has a frontend, but that still does not answer the question about maintenance.

These were just thoughts. Of course researching the answers would not be overly complicated.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#242

Post by kragen »

johndoe0815 wrote: post #238
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 ;)

I would add Jochen Liedtke (unfortunately he passed away already more than 20 years ago) as inventor of the L4 microkernel. Several research groups continued work on L4 after Liedtke's death (Hermann Härtig in Dresden, Gernot Heiser in Sydney, a bit of research at Frank Bellosa's group in Karlsruhe and more industrial research on L4 for embedded/RT systems by Robert Kaiser, later a professor in Wiesbaden), but I woul…

agreed, though i think l4 was more influential than eumel (which is free software now by the way) even though eumel preceded l4

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#243

Post by kragen »

nextos wrote: post #211
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 ;)

I'd also mention https://www.piumarta.com

ooh, yeah, now that's a possibility

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#244

Post by lallysingh »

blast wrote: post #52
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 goes back to Adriaan van Wijngaarden introducing Wirth at a conference in the 1960s. I'd love to see a video of the audience reaction to that one. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063519...

ACM Historian JAN Lee said he was the origin of that joke, if I recall that conversation correctly.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#245

Post by zilti »

PaulHoule wrote: post #113
kragen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bluesky seems like the site for people who think that the problem with twitter was that the wrong billionaire gets to decide which ideas to suppress (admittedly you could make the same criticism of hn; it certainly isn't decentralized and resilient against administrative censorship like usenet was)

Well I didn't mean to just endorse Bluesky but call it out as one of many alternatives. I'm actually active on Mastodon but I am thinking about getting on Instagram as well because the content I post that does the best on Mastodon would fit in there.

Do you know about Pixelfed?

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#246

Post by kragen »

amatecha wrote: post #210
kragen wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't get to be described as an 'apostle of simplicity' just because you like simplicity. you have to actually change the world by creating simplicity. devine and rek are still a long way from a turing award

you don't get to dictate who does or doesn't get recognized for creating awesome works that influence and inspire others. take your persistent negativity elsewhere. btw, uxn is absolutely the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand" and simplicity. I mean... > the resulting programs are succinct and translate well to pen & paper computing. > to make any one program available on a new platform, the…

i don't think uxn is trivial, i think it's a first step toward something great. it definitely isn't the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand"; you have to program it in assembly language, and a stack-based assembly language at that. in that sense it's closer to brainfuck than to hypertalk or excel or oberon. it falls short of its goal of working well on small computers (say, under a megabyte of ram and under a mips)

the bit you quote about uxn having a standard virtual machine to permit easy ports to new platforms is from wirth's 01965 paper on euler http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/; it isn't something devine and rek invented, and it may not have been something wirth invented either. schorre's 01963 paper on meta-ii targets a machine-independent 'fictitious machine' but it's not turing-complete and it's not clear if he intended it to be implemented by interpretation rather than, say, assembler macros

i suggest that if you develop more tolerance for opinions that differ from your own, instead of deprecating them as 'persistent negativity' and 'dictating', you will learn more rapidly, because other people know things you don't, and sometimes that is why our opinions differ. sometimes those things we know that you don't are even correct

i think this is one of those cases. what i said, that you were disagreeing with, was that uxn was not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming (and, let me clarify, a much less significant achievement) and that it is a long way from [meriting] a turing award. i don't see how anyone could possibly disagree with that, or gloss it as 'uxn is trivial', as you did, unless they don't know what those things are

i am pretty sure that if you ask devine what he thinks about this comment, you will find that he agrees with every word in it

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#247

Post by kragen »

vidarh wrote: post #213
kragen wrote: 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)

thank you, i definitely should have mentioned franz's work, even though i didn't know he was gal's advisor

perhaps more significant than tracemonkey was luajit, which achieves much higher performance with the tracing technique

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#248

Post by anon7725 »

usr1106 wrote: post #241
kragen wrote: 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…

> tex is written in pascal; Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures https://youtu.be/jbrMBOF61e0 : If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source? Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Well, GCC (as in GNU compiler collection) probably has a frontend,…

> Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore?

Of course

https://www.freepascal.org/

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#250

Post by usr1106 »

anon7725 wrote: post #248
usr1106 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tex is written in pascal; Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures https://youtu.be/jbrMBOF61e0 : If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source? Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Well, GCC (as in GNU compiler collection) probably has a frontend,…

> Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Of course https://www.freepascal.org/

Nice. Although "latest news" are from 2021.
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