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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#81

Post by johndoe0815 »

wozer wrote: post #5
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…

No better source yet, I think. But it is the real account of Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel language.

Niklaus Wirth's death was also announced (by Andreas Pirklbauer) an hour ago on the Oberon mailing list:

https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#83

Post by kragen »

nerpderp82 wrote: post #73
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…

As far as I know, Henry Baker is still with us. I had a dream where I interviewed Wirth for like 20 hrs so we could clone him with an LLM. We need to grab as much video interviews from folks as possible.

henry baker has made many great contributions, but last time i talked to him, he was waiting for somebody to start paying him again in order to do any more research

but i'm sure he'd agree his achievements are not in the same league as wirth's

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#84

Post by de6u99er »

khazhoux wrote: post #13

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardwa…

Pascal was the second language after Basic. I was always interested in learning Modula, but picked up Delphi instead.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#85

Post by scotty79 »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #26
khazhoux wrote: post #13

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardwa…

I learned Pascal and MODULA-2 in college, in my first two programming semesters. MODULA-2 was removed shortly afterwards but Pascal is still used in the introductory programming course. I'm very happy to have had these as the languages that introduced me to programming and Wirth occupies a very special place in my heart. His designs were truly ahead of their time.

I had Pascal and some Modula as well (on concurrent programming course).

I learned C++ later myself as a Pascal with bizzare syntax. I always felt like semantics of C++ was taken entirely from Pascal. No two lanuages ever felt closer to each other for me. Like one was just reskin of the other.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#87

Post by kragen »

johndoe0815 wrote: post #81
wozer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No better source yet, I think. But it is the real account of Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel language.

Niklaus Wirth's death was also announced (by Andreas Pirklbauer) an hour ago on the Oberon mailing list: https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html

thank you

dang, maybe we can change the url to this instead? this url has been stable for at least 14 years (http://web.archive.org/web/20070720035132/https://lists.inf....) and has a good chance of remaining stable for another 14, while the twitter url is likely to disappear this year or show different results to different people

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#89

Post by cscheid »

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…

> 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.

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