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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#51

Post by froh »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #47
kleiba wrote: post #16

@HN: Black banner, please?

Not trying to be crude, but is someone passing away after a long, rich life of 89 years something to mourn? Isn’t that kind of the best case scenario? For me something like a black banner signifies a tragedy, not merely a death. A bunch of children being shot, a war, a disease ravaging a country, etc. I’m curious to learn others’ perspectives however.

for computer science, Nikolaus Wirth was not simply "someone"

and a black ribon signifies a great loss, not a tragedy.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#52

Post by blast »

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...

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#54

Post by bmo-at »

parshua wrote: post #43

I started my first company based on Delphi, which itself was based on Turbo Pascal. Wirth was a great inspiration, and his passing is no small loss. May his work keep inspiring new programmers for generations to come. One of his quotes: "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, bu…

He was indeed! I wrote my bachelors thesis on bringing modularity to a language for monitoring real time systems and his work, especially on MODULA-2, was a huge source of inspiration.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#55

Post by vidarh »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #47
kleiba wrote: post #16

@HN: Black banner, please?

Not trying to be crude, but is someone passing away after a long, rich life of 89 years something to mourn? Isn’t that kind of the best case scenario? For me something like a black banner signifies a tragedy, not merely a death. A bunch of children being shot, a war, a disease ravaging a country, etc. I’m curious to learn others’ perspectives however.

We can mark it without particularly mourning it. HN often puts up black banners specifically for people who meant something to the HN community. E.g:

https://bear.willmeyers.net/whos-received-a-black-bar/

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#56

Post by kragen »

lukego wrote: 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…

i hope you are! we miss you

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#57

Post by bcantrill »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #47
kleiba wrote: post #16

@HN: Black banner, please?

Not trying to be crude, but is someone passing away after a long, rich life of 89 years something to mourn? Isn’t that kind of the best case scenario? For me something like a black banner signifies a tragedy, not merely a death. A bunch of children being shot, a war, a disease ravaging a country, etc. I’m curious to learn others’ perspectives however.

You know, I had a comment earlier about the importance of death rites being broadly lost on the young (and without meaning to sound pejorative, I have to believe that you are relatively young). I had thought to myself that I was perhaps being unfair -- surely even a child understands the importance of a funeral? -- but your comment shows that I wasn't wrong.

So as it apparently does need to be said: we're humans -- we mourn our dead. That is, the black bar denotes death, not tragedy; when we mourn those like Wirth who lived a full life, we can at once take solace in the fullness of a life lived and mourn that life is finite. The death rite allows us to reflect on the finiteness of our own lives, and the impact that Wirth had us, and the impact that we have on others. You are presumably too young to have felt this personal impact, but I assure you that many are brought back to their own earliest exposure to computing -- for many of us, was Pascal.

Again, RIP Nik Wirth; thank you for giving so many of us so much.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#58

Post by kragen »

082349872349872 wrote: post #33
FpUser wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is sad but the guy had long and fulfilling life many can only dream about. I would raise a toast to that. Hopefully he is in a coding Valhalla.

Not just coding: he was also interested* in hardware and built whole machines. (* might Carver Mead describe him as a metaphorical "tall, thin, person"?)

he very well might, dave. i miss talking to you

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#59

Post by squarefoot »

This is a huge loss in computer science. Everyone interested in computing, no matter if using other languages than Pascal or derivatives, should read his "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" book. R.I.P.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#60

Post by fasterik »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #47
kleiba wrote: post #16

@HN: Black banner, please?

Not trying to be crude, but is someone passing away after a long, rich life of 89 years something to mourn? Isn’t that kind of the best case scenario? For me something like a black banner signifies a tragedy, not merely a death. A bunch of children being shot, a war, a disease ravaging a country, etc. I’m curious to learn others’ perspectives however.

A lot of tragedies happen in the world, but you're not going to see a black bar on HN for every one of them. It's not so much about the magnitude of the loss, but the contribution that person made to the history of computing.
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