Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Niklaus Wirth has died

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 412 posts

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#331

Post by denton-scratch »

kragen wrote: post #258
jerf wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't won. Threads are alive and well and I rather expect async has probably already peaked and is back on track to be a niche that stays with us forever, but a niche nevertheless. Your opinion vs. my opinion, obviously. But the user reports of the experience in Rust is hardly even close to unanimous praise and I still say it's a mistake to sit down with an empty Rust program and immediately reach for "async" wit…

in the 02000s there was a lot of interest in software transactional memory as a programming interface that gives you the latency and throughput of preemptive multithreading with locks but the convenient programming interface of cooperative multitasking; in haskell it's still supported and performs well, but it has been largely abandoned in contexts like c#, because it kind of wants to own the whole world. it's diffic…

> in the 02000s there was a lot of interest

I read that as octal; so 1024 in decimal. Not a very interesting year, according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1024

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#332

Post by microtherion »

steveklabnik wrote: post #235
steveklabnik wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone on reddit found it! https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18xqea3/niklau...

The author cited, Michael Franz, was one of Wirth's PhD students, so what he relates is an oral communication from Wirth that may very well never have been put in writing. It does seem entirely consistent with his overall philosophy.

Wirth also had no compunction about changing the syntax of his languages if it made the compiler simpler. Modula-2 originally allowed undeclared forward references within the same file. When his implementation moved from the original multi pass compilers (e.g. Logitech's compiler had 5 passes: http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Logitech_Modula-2) to a single pass compiler http://sysecol2.ethz.ch/RAMSES/MacMETH.html he simply started requiring that forward references had to be declared (as they used to be in Pascal).

I suspect that Wirth not being particularly considerate of the installed base of his languages, and not very cooperative about participating in standardization efforts (possibly due to burn out from his participation in the Algol 68 process) accounts for the ultimately limited commercial success of Modula-2 & Oberon, and possibly for the decline of Pascal.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#333

Post by anta40 »

usr1106 wrote: post #250
anon7725 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nice. Although "latest news" are from 2021.

The discussions in Gitlab are still active: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues

Of course, you can always build the latest version from Git.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#334

Post by jstimpfle »

dotancohen wrote: post #323
nwellnhof wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that the "i" sound like in "wit" does not exist in German. The Germans pronounce "i" like English speakers pronounce "ee".

We have both, and I'd tend to pronounce "Wirth" similar to "wit" as far as the "i" goes. It's not always clear just from looking at the letter. But some words have explicit cues: There are "stretching consonants" like a-a, a-h, e-e, e-h, i-e, i-h, etc: Aal, Kahn, dehnen, dienen, sühnen, etc. And sometimes the following consonant gets doubled up to indicate a shorter pronunciation, like in "Bitte".

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#335

Post by rollcat »

kragen wrote: post #185
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... 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 . d…

> it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare

You're the one trying to directly compare achievement, not me. If you're looking for top achievers, I'd have to name PHP or systemd, and THAT would be out of place ;)

I even said "in no particular order", because I don't think any two can be easily compared.

My main criterion for inclusion was the drive for simplifying technology, and publishing these efforts:

> An apostle [...], in its literal sense, is an emissary. The word is [...] literally "one who is sent off" [...]. The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation.

Every single project, person, or community I've named here has some form of web page, blog, RSS feed, papers/presentations, and/or source code, that serve to carry their messages.

Achievement can be measured, simplicity can only be appreciated.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#336

Post by PaulHoule »

zilti wrote: post #245
PaulHoule wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yep. I interact w/ Pixelfed users on Mastodon all the time,

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#337

Post by hurtbird »

boznz wrote: post #174
kloch wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Love motivated me to replace C.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#338

Post by SushiHippie »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #305
self_awareness wrote: post #296

What I'm saddened with is that this not deserve HN's black strip bar at the top of the page.

The black bar was up yesterday. I’m guessing it’s midnight to midnight Pacific time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240104052617/https://news.ycom...

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#340

Post by teleforce »

superluserdo wrote: post #102
cscheid wrote: post #89

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…

His stance should be adopted by all languages authors and designers but apparently it's not. The older generation of programming language guru like Wirth and Hoare are religiously focused on simplicity hence they never take compilation time for granted unlike most popular modern languages authors. C++, Scala, Julia and Rust are all behemoth in term of complexity in language design hence have very slow compilation time. Popular modern languages like Go and D are the breath of fresh air with their lightning fast compilation due to their inherent simplicity in their design. This is to be expected since Go is just a modern version of Modula and Oberon, and D is designed by a former aircraft engineer where simplicity is mandatory not an option.
Post reply on HN