At least professionally, a life beautifully lived.
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Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#12It's so weird to me that he was already 7 when Pearl Harbor was bombed .
I was in a talk of his, where he said "I was a University professor at a time when a byte was 6 bits".
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#13> “I suppose that’s all very well if you don’t know how to design software.” Could anyone who may have more information elaborate on what Wirth meant by saying this ? Thank you.
He's deriding the agile movement. He's saying if you don't know how to properly design software (up front), then he supposes that doing it in an iterative fashion is an acceptable alternative. The way he says it implies that he disapproves of it.
In opinions such as this it pays to remind yourself that not everyone is faced with the same challenges. For all the esteem Wirth garners, I feel (at least at that time) his work on compilers and programming language design involves challenges that are very different from the challenges that inspired Extreme Programming.
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#14One of my favourity Wirth stories is he came to give a talk at my friend's university and they asked him how to pronounce his surname, whether you say it "wirt" or "worth" and he said "Well you can call me by name or you can call me by value".
Apparently it was a joke he used often but as a comp sci dad joke it totally rules.
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#15It's so weird to me that he was already 7 when Pearl Harbor was bombed .
What do you mean? Why is it weird? Did you mean to imply that you're surprised that he was old or that Pearl Harbor happened around an average lifetime ago ?
Well my grandfather was born years after that event, so it is kinda surprising, especially considering his profession.
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#16It's so weird to me that he was already 7 when Pearl Harbor was bombed .
I was in a talk of his, where he said "I was a University professor at a time when a byte was 6 bits".
He said that in his youth his colleagues were in awe of him because he was brave enough to give presentations in English. (They were shy and stuck to the local Swiss German dialect.)
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#17> ..., but all shared the vision of human as crafter & computer as tool (a perspective we would do well to come back to).
I feel this.
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean? Why is it weird? Did you mean to imply that you're surprised that he was old or that Pearl Harbor happened around an average lifetime ago ?
Well my grandfather was born years after that event, so it is kinda surprising, especially considering his profession.
My still-alive father was born before Wirth, and my grandparents were born in the 1800s. Generations can span quite a range.
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#19> “I suppose that’s all very well if you don’t know how to design software.” Could anyone who may have more information elaborate on what Wirth meant by saying this ? Thank you.
He's deriding the agile movement. He's saying if you don't know how to properly design software (up front), then he supposes that doing it in an iterative fashion is an acceptable alternative. The way he says it implies that he disapproves of it. In opinions such as this it pays to remind yourself that not everyone is faced with the same challenges. For all the esteem Wirth garners, I feel (at least at that time) his…
And not everyone has the same abilities. Tayloresquece methodologies like Agile are great for getting mediocre results for mediocre projects using mediocre developers (if they are not mediocre to begin with, certainly they will become so) in a repeatable and reportable fashion.
Re: Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
#20> “I suppose that’s all very well if you don’t know how to design software.” Could anyone who may have more information elaborate on what Wirth meant by saying this ? Thank you.
If you parse it, he is actually saying 2 things:
1: “very well”: methodology can help those without software design talent. You should stick to it if you know you can’t design software.
2: “don’t know”: Design can be learned but for the lazy there is methodology.