RIP Niklaus Wirth 1934-2024

Gerard Lally · 01-05-2024, 05:52 PM

Quote:

In his work, the languages and tools he created, in his eloquent plea for smaller, more efficient software – even in the projects from which he quit – his influence on the computer industry has been almost beyond measure. The modern software industry has signally failed to learn from him.

wpeckham · 01-05-2024, 05:58 PM

He became my hero when I found Pascal in the early 1980s. The Modula compilers were a treat, and Oberon genius! If you get to read his articles and writings, his thoughts are always clear and wise. After growing though a dozen languages and implementations during my career I often come back to derivatives of his works for a language to implement new projects without day-one vulnerabilities.

We have lost one of the true great men of Tech!

lonestar_italy · 01-06-2024, 04:52 AM

(Turbo) Pascal is the only programming language that I've seriously used in my life, apart for bash scripting. Elegance and clarity. RIP.

rizitis · 01-06-2024, 06:20 AM

A Legend

Code:

program RestInPeace;

begin
  WriteLn('RIP');
end.

madridsecreto · 01-06-2024, 07:10 AM

You can pay respects to the man by using GNU Modula-2, which is available in Slackware -current as part of gcc.

kazzan · 01-06-2024, 07:14 AM

I just threw out my old Pascal reference manual that I meticulously printed out on late evenings during my student years.
I'll raise my glass in honor of Mr. Wirth

dhalliwe · 01-06-2024, 08:26 AM

Turbo Pascal was the third programming language I learned, after FORTRAN and Basic. I continued to use FORTRAN for serious number-crunching, but anything I did in Basic was switched over to Turbo Pascal. Used it for years until work pressures pushed me in other directions.

Pascal had its weaknesses (such as variables declared in higher-level routines being inherited by every subordinate routine), but it was a very clear language and forced good coding practices. I tended to think of it as a voluntarily-used straight jacket. By the time the compiler accepted the code, the code was usually doing what I wanted it to do.

I also remember Wirth's answer to how his last name was pronounced: "You can call me by name, or you can call me by value."

Didier Spaier · 01-06-2024, 02:38 PM

I have not really used pascal but read the PASCAL User Manual and Report. For some reason I remember the example of type definition for a person. Yes, he also had a sense of humor.

slackerDude · 01-06-2024, 03:47 PM

We had to learn Pascal for our first programming course in uni. Thereafter, it was C. I already knew like 3 flavors of Basic (my favorite: GFA Basic), and had dabbled in 6502 assembler. Pascal felt like C with some of the dangerous stuff removed and bit more handholding than I liked, but overall, I always respected it as a decent 1st/2nd programming language and Turbo Pascal was a really good dev environment, much like Turbo C/C++.

OutSiderBR · 01-07-2024, 07:59 AM

RIP, Mr. Wirth. I studied Pascal and Turbo Pascal, worked with Tubo Pascal for 8 years and learned to be organized in programming. I still have 2 of his books, which I have read at least 3 times each. I used to return to them when developing a new algorithm. The books are:

Systematic Programming: An Introduction
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

rclark · 01-07-2024, 03:07 PM

RIP Mr. Wirth. Pascal was the learning language at the College I studied at for my CS degree. When I got my first personal computer (1/2 price through college), a DEC Rainbow, Turbo Pascal was 'out'. This was great because I do my assignments at home and then upload and re-compile on the VAX. After college, I used all the Borland products in the first part of my career. Turbo Pascal, all the updates, then along came Delphi for RAD development. Then came Turbo C, Tasm, Borland C/C++, Prolog, and a few other products.... Who needed the M$ except for OS? Now I use Lazarus or just fpc from command-line for pascal development. There is also the stand-a-lone Ultibo (Customized Lazarus) environment for Raspberry Pi development. All thanks to Mr. Wirth creating Pascal in the first place. Fun times!

notzed · 01-09-2024, 02:41 PM

I hated Pascal with a passion in first year uni ('91) although was first exposed to it in high school. However despite that I think it's a much better teaching language than python or even Java for data structures and algorithms. I was Amiga (and later on Slackware) all the way back then so never used TurboPascal outside of uni.

Then again I thought C was confusing at first with all it's squiggly lines and stars but then I fell completely in love with it - and it's still my favourite language for hacking. To be honest they're almost the same language at heart but C dropped that verbose ALGOL syntax and added pointers (which turbo pascal had anyway, albeit with an even shitter syntax than C).

Reading his obit I probably should've looked into him more, I'm a huge fan of less-is-more and C++ has gone the way of ALGOL-60 IMO, it's just popular for some dumb reason. I do remember being curious about modula-2 and oberon but these were kind of pants or unavailable on AmigaOS so the curiosity didn't last.

dchmelik · 01-10-2024, 12:47 AM

In 1997 my college computer science (CS) professor said the three people everyone listens to in CS are Drs CAR Hoare, Edsger Dijkstra, Niklaus Wirth.

smallpond · 01-10-2024, 06:02 AM

Code:

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, 
which is baffling - the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather 
than admiration.
   - Niklaus Wirth