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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#341

Post by dotancohen »

jstimpfle wrote: post #334
dotancohen wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Thank you.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#342

Post by dotancohen »

housecarpenter wrote: post #329
dotancohen wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The "i" sound in "wit" does exist in German and is what is normally indicated by "i" on its own. The long "ee" sound is normally spelt as "ie" in German.

Thank you.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#343

Post by G3rn0ti »

denton-scratch wrote: post #330
vram22 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Veert" is correct, in the sense that it's how a German would pronounce it. Of course, the great man wasn't German; I don't know how he pronounced his own surname. "Wit" is just wrong. Perhaps that was a joke that I missed about the man's humour.

> Of course, the great man wasn't German.

He was Swiss, more exactly from the city of Winterthur located in the canton (state) of Zürich. The canton's official language is German, however. Of course, people over there speak in a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch".

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#344

Post by Thorrez »

vram22 wrote: post #130
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."

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

The linked tweet says "Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way ('Ni-klows Wirt'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nick-les Worth'. This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value."

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#345

Post by senderista »

kragen wrote: post #274
senderista wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It grew out of an in-memory MVCC DB I was building at my previous job. After the company folded I worked on it on my own time for a couple months, implementing some perf ideas I had never had time to work on, and when update transactions were <1us latency I realized it was fast enough to be an STM. I haven't finished implementing the STM API described on the site, though, so it's not available for download at this po…

that's exciting! i just learned about hitchhiker trees (and fractal tree indexes, blsm trees, buffer trees, etc.) this weekend, and i'm really excited about the possibility of using them for mvcc. i have no idea how i didn't find out about them 15 years ago!

Then you may be interested in this paper which shows how to turn any purely functional data structure into an MVCC database.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~yihans/papers/concurrency.pdf

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#346

Post by denton-scratch »

G3rn0ti wrote: post #343
denton-scratch wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Veert" is correct, in the sense that it's how a German would pronounce it. Of course, the great man wasn't German; I don't know how he pronounced his own surname. "Wit" is just wrong. Perhaps that was a joke that I missed about the man's humour.

> Of course, the great man wasn't German. He was Swiss, more exactly from the city of Winterthur located in the canton (state) of Zürich. The canton's official language is German, however. Of course, people over there speak in a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch".

Thank you for the correction. I assumed he spoke a variant of american-english. So how did he pronounce his own name? I've never heard his voice.

> a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch".

Damn, I've never seen a word with three u-umlauts in it. How the hell do you pronounce two consecutive u-umlauts? "eu-eu"?

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#347

Post by simonebrunozzi »

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."

This is brilliant.

It reminds me of my only meeting with Andy Tanenbaum / AAT [0], one of the smartest, nicest computer science guy I've ever met in my life. I can't recall the many puns and jokes he shared, but it was just incredible.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#348

Post by G3rn0ti »

denton-scratch wrote: post #346
G3rn0ti wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, the great man wasn't German. He was Swiss, more exactly from the city of Winterthur located in the canton (state) of Zürich. The canton's official language is German, however. Of course, people over there speak in a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch".

Thank you for the correction. I assumed he spoke a variant of american-english. So how did he pronounce his own name? I've never heard his voice. > a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch". Damn, I've never seen a word with three u-umlauts in it. How the hell do you pronounce two consecutive u-umlauts? "eu-eu"?

You just elongate the vowel i.e. pronounce it longer. The double „ü“ just indicates this vowel to be stressed. Dialects do not follow a strict orthography, however, so you might find it written slightly differently in other contexts.

Wirth lived in the United States for some time throughout his life but is a Zürich native. He must have spoken Züritüütsch („Zurich German“) privately, I am pretty sure (without having known him personally).

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#349

Post by kragen »

senderista wrote: post #345
kragen wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's exciting! i just learned about hitchhiker trees (and fractal tree indexes, blsm trees, buffer trees, etc.) this weekend, and i'm really excited about the possibility of using them for mvcc. i have no idea how i didn't find out about them 15 years ago!

Then you may be interested in this paper which shows how to turn any purely functional data structure into an MVCC database. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~yihans/papers/concurrency.pdf

thank you!

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#350

Post by kragen »

jacquesm wrote: post #315
kragen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks! i like lua a lot despite its flaws; that's what i wrote my own literate programming system in. lua's 'bytecode' is actually a wordcode (a compilation approach which i think wirth's euler paper was perhaps the first published example of) and quite similar in some ways to wirth's risc-1/2/3/4/5 hardware architecture family i hope they do go to open access; these papers are too valuable to be lost to future acm…

Are you familiar with the 'Leo' editor? It is the one that comes closest to what I consider to be a practically useful literate programming environment. If you haven't looked at it yet I'd love it if you could give it a spin and let me know what you make of it. https://leo-editor.github.io/leo-editor/

i read a little about it many years ago but have never tried it. right now, for all its flaws, jupyter is the closest approximation to the literate-programming ideal i've found
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