Niklaus Wirth has died

https://twitter.com/Bertrand_Meyer/status/1742613897675178347

by aarroyoc • 3 years ago

1902 403 3 years ago

kragen65• 3 years ago

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 the practical, as opposed to academic, significance of his work, so let me point out that begin

the ide as we know it today was born as turbo pascal;

most early macintosh software was written in pascal, including for example macpaint;

robert griesemer, one of the three original designers of golang, was wirth's student and did his doctoral thesis on an extension of oberon, and wirth's languages were also a very conspicuous design inspiration for newsqueak;

tex is written in pascal;

end;

end.

wozer• 3 years ago

No better source yet, I think.

But it is the real account of Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel language.

kragen65• 3 years ago

yeah, and i hope meyer would know

but still, it's twitter, liable to vanish or block non-logged-in access at any moment

johndoe08152• 3 years ago

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

Qem2• 3 years ago

wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand; now only hoare and moore remain

Also Alan Kay still with us.

kragen65• 3 years ago

in the neat/scruffy divide, which goes beyond ai, wirth was the ultimate neat, and kay is almost the ultimate scruffy, though wall outdoes him

alan kay is equally great, but on some axes he is the opposite extreme from wirth: an apostle of flexibility, tolerance for error, and trying things to see what works instead of planning everything out perfectly. as sicp says

Pascal is for building pyramids—imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms—imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place.

kay is an ardent admirer of lisp, and smalltalk is even more of an organism language than lisp is

yawaramin• 3 years ago

Martin Odersky, creator of the Scala language and Wirth's student, also seems to believe it: https://twitter.com/odersky/status/1742618391553171866

nerpderp825• 3 years ago

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.

kragen65• 3 years ago

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

rollcat3• 3 years ago

wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand;

And yet far from the last. Simple, correct, and beautiful software is still being made today. Most of it goes unnoticed, its quiet song drowned out by the cacophony of attention-seeking, complex, brittle behemoths that top the charts.

That song never faded, you just need to tune in.

kragen65• 3 years ago

who are today's new great minimalists?

tahnyall• 3 years ago

It's OK on Hacker News to dis a reputable news source now?

bumbledraven2• 3 years ago

wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand; now only hoare and moore remain…

No. There is another.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_%28computer_s...

vidarh15• 3 years ago

Some would dispute the "built for humans to understand". Whitney's work is brilliant, but it's far less accessible than Wirth's.

kragen65• 3 years ago

well, simplicity anyway, arguably (like moore) to an even higher degree than wirth

vidarh15• 3 years ago

I've been a massive fan of the PhD dissertation of Wirth's student Michael Franz since I first read it in '94. He's now a professor at UC Irvine, where he supervised Andreas Gal's dissertation work on trace trees (what eventually became TraceMonkey)

kragen65• 3 years ago

thank you, i definitely should have mentioned franz's work, even though i didn't know he was gal's advisor

perhaps more significant than tracemonkey was luajit, which achieves much higher performance with the tracing technique

usr11062• 3 years ago

tex is written in pascal;

Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures https://youtu.be/jbrMBOF61e0 : If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source? Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Well, GCC (as in GNU compiler collection) probably has a frontend, but that still does not answer the question about maintenance.

These were just thoughts. Of course researching the answers would not be overly complicated.

anon7725• 3 years ago

Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore?

Of course

https://www.freepascal.org/

svat• 3 years ago

If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source?

If you install TeX via the usual ways–TeX Live and MikTeX are the most common—then the build step runs a program (like web2c) to convert the Pascal source (with changes) to C, then uses a C compiler. (So the Pascal source is still used, but the Pascal "compiler" is a specialized Pascal-to-C translator.) But there is also TeX-FPC (https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-fpc), a small set of change (patch) files to make TeX compilable with the Free Pascal compiler (https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/).

For more details see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111332/how-to-compil...

rramadass• 3 years ago

wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand

Absolutely!

And equally important was his ability to convey/teach CS precisely, concisely and directly in his books/papers. None of them have any fluff nor unnecessary obfuscation in them. These are the models to follow and the ideals to aspire to.

As an example see his book Systematic Programming: An Introduction.

msie• 3 years ago

R.I.P.

pengaru• 3 years ago

RIP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

formerly_proven• 3 years ago

end;

boznz2• 3 years ago

end.

nobleach• 3 years ago

I owe a debt of gratitude to him and the Pascal programming language. Sincerest condolences to those he left behind.

bitwize• 3 years ago

Time for a black bar on the front page. Wirth had been around since forever, influencing how we and generations before us program.

AlbertCory• 3 years ago

I'm happy to say I got to meet him, thanks to Charles Simonyi. May his memory be a blessing.

pjmlp18• 3 years ago

I was at the session he did at CERN back in 2004, but sadly never managed to talk to him.

khazhoux• 3 years ago

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 hardware design and simulation system. In 1984, he received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award for the development of these languages.

pjmlp18• 3 years ago

Also collaborated with Apple on Object Pascal initial design, his students on Component Pascal, Active Oberon, Zonnon, and many other research projects derived from Oberon.

bsimpson• 3 years ago

For those who don't know, Pascal was what a lot of the classic Mac software was written in, before Objective-C and Swift. It grew into Delphi, which was a popular low-code option on Windows.

TremendousJudge2• 3 years ago

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.

scotty79• 3 years ago

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.

kloch• 3 years ago

Pascal was the second language I learned after Fortran. I didn't particularly like Fortran but Pascal really hit home and motivated me to learn C.

boznz2• 3 years ago

Love motivated me to learn Pascal, Money motivated me to learn C.

skrebbel• 3 years ago

I still wonder what the tech world would’ve been like today if Wirth had had the marketing sense to call Modula “Pascal 2”

sedatk4• 3 years ago

…also if he hadn’t insisted on uppercase keywords.

de6u99er2• 3 years ago

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

musicale3• 3 years ago

I'm kind of a fan of Lola, an easy-to-learn HDL which was inspired by Pascal/Oberon vs. Verilog (inspired by C) and VHDL, inspired by Ada.

I like Wirth's whole software stack: RISC-5 (not to be confused with RISC-V) implemented in Lola, Oberon the language, and Oberon the environment. IIRC Lola can generate Verilog - I think the idea was that students could start with an FPGA board and create their own CPU, compiler, and OS.

I also like his various quips - I think he said something like "I am a professor who is a programmer, and a programmer who is a professor." We need more programmer/professors like that. Definitely an inspiration for systems people everywhere.

neilv• 3 years ago

I don't see obituaries yet. In the meantime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

gjvc3• 3 years ago

now would be a good time read this in his memory https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

Also, his Oberon system provides a rich seam to mine. This, from a symposium held at ETH Zurich on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2014, is a whirlwind retrospective. "Reviving a computer system of 25 years ago" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0

One of the greats.

kleiba• 3 years ago

@HN: Black banner, please?

adamnemecek• 3 years ago

If there was ever a reason for one, this is it.

wiz21c2• 3 years ago

Double on this.

bcantrill2• 3 years ago

Perhaps perversely (or maybe just a reflection of my own middle age?), but the HN black bar is one of my favorite aspects of HN. Death rites are essential, but their significance is often lost on the young who (naturally) pervade tech; what HN has developed in the black bar is really perfect.

Anyway: I trust we're just seeing natural human latency here, but this clearly merits the HN black bar. RIP, Nik Wirth -- truly one of the giants, and someone whose work had a tremendous personal influence for so many of us!

Copenjin• 3 years ago

YES.

erikpukinskis• 3 years ago

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.

froh2• 3 years ago

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

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

vidarh15• 3 years ago

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/

bcantrill2• 3 years ago

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.

fasterik• 3 years ago

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.

Jtsummers• 3 years ago

While very out of fashion these days, a black armband used to be a signal of mourning someone's death, whether the death was a "tragedy" (likely meaning unexpected, particularly violent, particularly early, or something similar) or not. The black bar is a digital imitation of that.

Niklaus Wirth contributed quite a bit to our field, and, directly or indirectly, impacted many of the people who frequent this (programming technology oriented) site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_armband

masklinn• 3 years ago

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?

It can be "kind of a best case scenario" and yet you still mourn the loss. Mourning doesn't require a tragedy.

My grandmother died in her sleep at 94, pretty healthy all things considered (still had a good head, could putter along, and was in her own home of more than 60 years), after having had a great day. Pretty much the best death she and we could have hoped for. I still wouldn't have minded having her nearby for a few more years.

madmountaingoat• 3 years ago

I think mourning is more than just tragedy. It's recognition of loss. And the tradition of black things around death has seemed more a sign or respect than as indication of some tragic underpinnings. But I actually don't know the history of the tradition, so I am happy to be corrected.

nvrmnd• 3 years ago

Some people say that it doesn't matter if someone dies at age 89 -- after they have lived a full life and contributed all they had to give -- it's still just as sad and shocking.

Personally, I don't agree, to me it's just not as sad or shocking. People don't live forever and Wirth's life was as successful and complete as possible. It's not a "black day" where society truly lost someone before they fulfilled their potential.

CRConrad7• 3 years ago

Yeah, that just shows you haven't yet grasped what mourning is.

eatonphil2• 3 years ago

I loved the book Compiler Construction. Wirth's emphasis on minimalism is a huge inspiration.

munificent• 3 years ago

I haven't read that one yet, but "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" is just an absolutely beautiful gem of a book. It embodies his principles of simplicity and clarity. Even though it's outdated in many places, I adored reading it.

eatonphil2• 3 years ago

That's the other one I keep hearing about, must read it.

ufo• 3 years ago

Speaking of which, that book is one of the very few sources I could find that talks about recursive descent error recovery and goes further than panic mode.

int_19h• 3 years ago

There's also an interesting book "A model implementation of standard Pascal" - not by Wirth - that implements an ISO Standard Pascal compiler in Standard Pascal, written as a "literate program" with copious descriptions of every single aspect. Basically, the entire book is one large program in which non-code is interspersed as very long multiline comments.

I couldn't find it available for download anywhere, but Internet Archive has a version of it in the library that can be checked out for free: https://archive.org/details/modelimplementat0000wels/page/n9...

pdw• 3 years ago

Here's my transcription of that book: https://2k38.be/misp/

compiler.pas can be compiled with a modern Pascal compiler, but the resulting compiler cannot compile itself. I don't know if that's caused by a transcription error, a bug in the modern compiler or a bug in the Model Implementation.

I would love it if somebody gets this working. I don't think I myself will continue with this project.

tasty_freeze• 3 years ago

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."

wiz21c2• 3 years ago

Best CS pun ever. Thanks for sharing !!!

the_arun• 3 years ago

Looks like he had a good sense of humor too.

blast2• 3 years ago

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...

moritzwarhier• 3 years ago

Today I learned (from the Wikiquote page), what an obviously socially witty person he seems to have been!

Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.

It is refreshing to see the old-fashioned trope of the genius computer scientist / software enginieer as a "foreigner to the world" being contested again and again by stories like this.

Of course people like Niklaus Wirth are exceptional in many ways, so it might be that the trope has/had some grain of truth, that just does not co-correlate with the success of said person :)

And of course people might want to argue about the differences betweem SE, CS and economics.

After all that rambling... RIP and thank you Niklaus!

lallysingh• 3 years ago

ACM Historian JAN Lee said he was the origin of that joke, if I recall that conversation correctly.

phooda• 3 years ago

He was the go to guy for witty comments.

fsckboy• 3 years ago

Dijkstra would consider that one harmful. In America we consider Wirth the to go guy for witty takeaways.

vram2210• 3 years ago

Goto the top of the class.

vram2210• 3 years ago

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

nwellnhof• 3 years ago

It's pronounced with an ɪ like in "wit".

Thorrez• 3 years ago

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."

rabbits77• 3 years ago

The joke really only works if you use his first name! The complete joke is that "by value" means pronouncing first and last name to sound like "Nickles Worth".

alanbernstein• 3 years ago

"worth" alone still means "value" though

coldtea• 3 years ago

I always (and still) undestood it to just need the surname.

ggambetta• 3 years ago

The way I understand it, it doesn't -- by name (aka by reference) vs by value, as in function arguments.

vram2210• 3 years ago

Said the same here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15361069

at the end of the comment.

simonebrunozzi• 3 years ago

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

pjmlp18• 3 years ago

A sad day for the history of computing, the loss of a great language designer, that influenced many of us in better ways to approach systems programming.

FpUser• 3 years ago

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.

082349872349872• 3 years ago

Not just coding: he was also interested* in hardware and built whole machines.

(* might Carver Mead describe him as a metaphorical "tall, thin, person"?)

frognumber4• 3 years ago

I am not very sad. Death is part of life.

I'm much more sad when life sort of decays (Alzheimer's, dementia, or simply becoming slow/stupid/decrepit), ends early, or when life is simply wasted.

He was about to turn 90.

He lead a long, impactful, fulfilling life.

That's a life to celebrate.

marttt2• 3 years ago

This is beautiful phrasing, very much how I think about life myself. Let's hope the last days of Mr Wirth were free from physical pain. Thinking of my grandpa who died all of a sudden, apparently without serious physical impairments or aches, at age 90, after a happy, well-lived, ethical life.

Heaven is happier by one person now for sure, again. And maybe some compilers over there also need tinkering. Rest in peace, Mr Wirth.

lordgroff• 3 years ago

One of the titans of the era, Pascal greatly contributed to my love of programming and my eventual career. Rest in peace Dr. Wirth.

lukego• 3 years ago

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 homebrew CPU running on a random FPGA dev board with USB peropherals. My ambition is to be that kind of 80 year old one day, too.

kragen65• 3 years ago

i hope you are! we miss you

cscheid• 3 years ago

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.

frognumber4• 3 years ago

Supported cooperative multitasking won in the end.

It just renamed itself to asynchronous programing. That's quite literally what an 'await' is.

superluserdo• 3 years ago

His stance on compiler optimizations is another example: only add optimization passes if they improve the compiler's self-compilation time.

What an elegant metric! Condensing a multivariate optimisation between compiler execution speed and compiler codebase complexity into a single self-contained meta-metric is (aptly) pleasingly simple.

I'd be interested to know how the self-build times of other compilers have changed by release (obviously pretty safe to say, generally increasing).

steveklabnik6• 3 years ago

Do you happen to remember where he said that? I've been looking for a citation and can't find one.

I think that some of the text in "16.1. General considerations" of "Compiler Construction" are sorta close, but does not say this explicitly.

kristianp• 3 years ago

In the past, this policy of Wirth's has been cited when talking about go compiler development.

Go team member, Robert Griesemer, did his Phd under Mössenböck and Wirth.

pjmlp18• 3 years ago

Note that Oberon descendents like Active Oberon and Zonnon, do have premptive multitasking.

spongebobism• 3 years ago

That's fascinating. I'd imagine there are actually two equilibria/stable states possible under this rule: a small codebase with only the most effective optimization passes, or a large codebase that incorporates pretty much any optimization pass.

A marginally useful optimization pass would not pull its weight when added to the first code base, but could in the second code base because it would optimize the run time spent on all the other marginal optimizations.

Though the compiler would start out closer to the small equilibrium in its initial version, and there might not be a way to incrementally move towards the large equilibrium from there under Wirth's rule.

gjvc3• 3 years ago

... his 80th birthday symposium at ETH where he showed off his new port of Oberon to a homebrew CPU running on a random FPGA dev board with USB peripherals.

This was a fantastic talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0

lynguist• 3 years ago

Thank you for sharing. I was there and didn’t expect to see this again. :)

He had the crowd laughing and cheering, and the audience questions in the end were absolutely excellent.

vram2210• 3 years ago

A Wirthwhile ambition. :)

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I first wrote it as "worthwhile", but then the pun practically fell out of the screen at me.

I love Wirth's work, and not just his languages. Also his stuff like algorithms + data = programs, and stepwise refinement. Like many others here, Pascal was one of my early languages, and I still love it, in the form of Delphi and Free Pascal.

RIP, guruji.

Edited to say guruji instead of guru, because the ji suffix is an honorific in Hindi, although guru is already respectful.

microtherion3• 3 years ago

According to his daughter (she runs a grocery store, and my wife occasionally talks to her), he kept on tinkering at home well past 80.

tibbydudeza• 3 years ago

A giant of the programming language field. My first programming language was Pascal (Borland) before I got introduced to C.

Sunspark• 3 years ago

RIP GOAT.

switchbak• 3 years ago

The passing of a titan like he was deserves a little more respect than simply saying: "RIP GOAT".

hooverd• 3 years ago

Rest in peace, greatest of all time.

bregma• 3 years ago

So it goes.

omoikane• 3 years ago

Niklaus Wirth was also responsible for changing the title of Dijkstra's paper to "Goto Statement Considered Harmful".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful#cite_ref-6

tommsy64• 3 years ago

Relevant excerpt of Dijkstra's own account (from EWD1308 [1]):

Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.

[1] Transcription - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1... PDF - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF

bb88• 3 years ago

And it continues to this day!

abc_lisper• 3 years ago

My very first language was Pascal. I have since forgotten it, but distinctly remember the feeling computers are fun! And the red pascal book. Thank you Niklaus, for all the fun and impact you had on subsequent languages.

baus• 3 years ago

Modula-2 had a huge influence on my early understanding of Software Engineering and Computer Science. I feel it is one of his under-valued contributions. RIP Niklaus. One of the great ones.

parshua• 3 years ago

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, but Americans call me by value."

bmo-at• 3 years ago

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.

blast2• 3 years ago

Wirth must have adopted the quote (how could he not), but it actually goes back to a clever line by someone introducing him at a conference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858993

dvaun• 3 years ago

What conference was it? Edit: Nvm, saw your other comment[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858993

Qem2• 3 years ago

RIP Mr. Wirth. The first programming language I ever learnt was Pascal, that brings me fond memories. A big loss for the computer science community.

kragen65• 3 years ago

minor quibble: dr. wirth had a doctorate from berkeley

squarefoot• 3 years ago

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.

vidarh15• 3 years ago

When I first got to play with Turbo Pascal (3.something?), I was more impressed by the concise expression of the language in the EBNF in the manual than by Turbo Pascal itself, and it was what made me interested in parsers and compilers, and both Wirth's approach to them and the work his students undertook in his research group has been an interest of mine for well over 30 years since.

blackhaz• 3 years ago

Coming from ZX Spectrum at home and seeing the beauty of Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC-compatible has greatly contributed to my love of programming. R.I.P., Professor Wirth.

nerpderp825• 3 years ago

Damn.

throw_m239339• 3 years ago

RIP, a great loss for computer science.

Some people here are recommending greats books he wrote, definitely worth reading.

HumblyTossed• 3 years ago

A great loss. I cherish my copy of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". I re-read it every couple of years.

bhaak2• 3 years ago

I'm a former student of his. He was one of the people that made me from a teenager that hacked on his keyboard to get something to run to a seasoned programmer that thinks before he codes.

Even before I met him at the university I was programming in Oberon because there was a big crowd of programmers doing Wirth languages on the Amiga.

He will be missed.

sterlind• 3 years ago

which languages? I've just restored an Amiga 500 with Workbench 2.1 and I'd love to honor his memory.

mkesper• 3 years ago

Modula2 was available and got used on Amiga. Silly teenager me found such high level languages "cheating" at the time.

bhaak2• 3 years ago

At least several Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon-2 compilers.

My very first compiled programming language was Pascal. I got the free "PCQ Pascal" from the Fish disks as I wasn't able to get the C headers from Commodore which I would have needed for doing proper Amiga programming. Likewise later Oberon-A although I don't remember where I got that from.

There were also commercial Modula-2 and Oberon-2 compilers. I just found that the Modula-2 compiler was open sourced some years back. https://m2amiga.claudio.ch/

Aminet has directories for Oberon and Modula-2 related programs: https://aminet.net/dev/obero and https://aminet.net/dev/m2

microtherion3• 3 years ago

I'm also a student of his, and later met him socially on a few occasions as a graduate student (in a different institute).

Undergraduate students were all in awe of him, but I got the impression that he did not particularly enjoy teaching them (Unlike other professors, however, he did not try to delegate that part of his responsibilities to his assistants). He seemed to have a good relationship with his graduate students.

In his class on compiler construction, he seemed more engaged (the students were already a bit more experienced, and he was iterating the Oberon design at the time). I remember an exchange we had at the oral exam — he asked me to solve the "dangling ELSE" problem in Pascal. I proposed resolving the ambiguity through a refinement of the language grammar. He admitted that this would probably work, but thought it excessively complex and wondered where I got that idea, since he definitely had not taught it, so I confessed that I had seen the idea in the "Dragon Book" (sort of the competition to his own textbook). Ultimately, I realized that he just wanted me to change the language to require an explicit END, as he had done in Modula-2 and Oberon.

Socially, he was fun to talk to, had a great store of computer lore, of course. He was also much more tolerant of "heresies" in private than in public, where he came across as somewhat dogmatic. Once, the conversation turned to Perl, which I did not expect him to have anything good to say about. To my surprise, he thought that there was a valid niche for pattern matching / text processing languages (mentioning SNOBOL as an earlier language in this niche).

pjmlp18• 3 years ago

Yes, the Amiga was one of the platforms where Modula-2 had quite a crowd, more so than on the PC, as we got spoiled with Turbo Pascal instead.

googamooga• 3 years ago

R.I.P. Niklaus Wirth. Your ideas, languages and designs were the inspiration for several generations of computer scientists and engineers. Your Lilith computer and Modula-2 language kindled a small group of students in Western Siberia’s Akademgorodok to create KRONOS - an original RISC processor-based computer, with it’s own OS and Modula-2 complier, and lots of tools. I was very lucky to join the KRONOS team in 1986 as a 16 yo complete beginner, and this changed my life forever as I become obsessed with programming. Thank you, Niklaus.

madamelic2• 3 years ago

Am I understanding correctly that he was the sole maintainer of Algol at the age of 86 years old? Or was it more supervisory / BDFL?

kragen65• 3 years ago

algol isn't a piece of software, so it doesn't have maintainers. i don't know if the algol committee ever officially disbanded but wirth had already resigned before algol 68 came out

madamelic2• 3 years ago

Oh sorry, I misremembered the list and meant Oberon but fair point. I had just noticed that the last stable release was in 2020.

If I had read more closely to the wording, the language was _designed_ by Wirth but that doesn't necessiate him being fingers-to-keyboard (or whatever modality) despite it saying he was the developer.

submeta• 3 years ago

Pascal (Turbo Pascal on a PC) was my second programming language after Assembler and some C (had a copy of Aztec-C compiler) on an Amiga when I was 17ish. Pascal taught me modular programming, breaking down largensystems. I‘d written my own matrix calc library and would program animations for my physics class. And I learned the basic concepts of OO. It was a joy to program in.

RIP Niklaus Wirth.

froh2• 3 years ago

I hold an old print of his Pascal language report near and dear on my.bookshelf. he bootstrapped oberon with one peer in 1-2 years.

his preference for clarity over notational fancyness inspired so many of us.

the Pascal family of languages are not only syntactically unambiguous to the compiler they are also clear and unambiguous to humans. can. the Carbon successor to c++ strives for the same iirc.

WesolyKubeczek• 3 years ago

May he and his work be forever remembered.

throw7• 3 years ago

RIP. After Basic (on a commodore), I learned Pascal (turbo pascal) in high school of all places.

anticensor• 3 years ago

Wirth made one of the most critical observations in the whole history of computing: as hardware develops, software complicates to compensate and slow things down even further.

Decabytes• 3 years ago

I was just exploring Pascal last month. I've been meaning to do some more programming in it. I think it's a good compromise for someone who wants a lower level language but doesn't want to use C or C++. The FreePascal compiler also rips through thousands of lines of code a second so the compile times are really short

raphlinus• 3 years ago

Prof Wirth was a major inspiration for me as a kid. I eagerly read his book on Pascal, at the time not appreciating how unusual it was for its elegance and simplicity. I also followed with interest his development of the Oberon language and Lilith workstation. When I was 13, he gave a talk not too far away, I think it might have been Johns Hopkins, and my dad took me to it. It was a wonderful experience, he was very kind and encouraging, as I think the linked photo[1] shows.

[1] https://mastodon.online/@raph/111693863925852135

de6u99er2• 3 years ago

Great story. Thanks for sharing.

markus_zhang• 3 years ago

Oh God, no!

I need to read his compiler book once I completed my toy interpreter.

olvy0• 3 years ago

Pascal was my first "real" language after Basic, learned it in the late 80s, wrote a couple of small apps for my dad in it.

Learned most of it from a wonderful book whose name I have forgotten, it had a wrench on its cover, I think?

Anyway, still rocking Pascal to this day, since I still maintain 3 moderately complex installers written with InnoSetup, which uses RemObjects Pascal as a scripting language.

4 years ago, a new guy on our team, fresh from school, who never even knew this language existed, picked up Pascal in a week, and started maintaining and developing our installers much further. He did grumble a bit about the syntax but otherwise did a splendid job. I thought that was a tribute to the simplicity of the language.

lioeters• 3 years ago

Pascal was my first "real" language after Basic, learned it in the late 80s

Me too, word for word. I spent a few years in my pre-teens immersed in the Turbo Pascal IDE, which was a full-on educational tool of its own that explained everything about the language. I moved on to C after that, but I still get a nostalgic vibe from looking at Pascal syntax. It was a great foundational experience for me as a programmer.

ksec2• 3 years ago

He did grumble a bit about the syntax but otherwise did a splendid job. I thought that was a tribute to the simplicity of the language.

I still to this day dont understand why vast majority of people in programming dislike the syntax of Pascal.

forinti• 3 years ago

Pascal was my second language, after BASIC. I was about twelve and pointers cost me a little to understand. But the first hurdle was not having line numbers. It seemed weird.

In the end, it was definitely worth the effort, and I learnt good habits from it. I used it in college, and I suppose I kinda still do, because I do a lot of PL/SQL.

He was hugely important for generations of coders.

RIP.

zeroc8• 3 years ago

Delphi/Object Pascal was my favorite programming environment for a long time. PL/SQL is Ada though.

fiddlerwoaroof• 3 years ago

I learned to program in Delphi and, to this day, I haven’t ever found a tool for building GUIs as pleasant. So, I’m fond of Wirth-inspired languages.

saiya-jin• 3 years ago

... and you never will, since OSes don't provide anything like that out of box and to make design ecosystem work like that, a major effort for fat clients would be needed. In a time when dev tools are mostly free (apart from intellij idea but this approach has its own drawbacks) and focused on other technologies / platforms.

elvis70• 3 years ago

I really appreciate his work. He had a full life. Since yesterday, without knowing, I was just studying a section of a book detailing the code generation of one of the first Pascal compilers for the CDC 6400.

emmelaich• 3 years ago

I liked his witticism "You can call me by name (Veert) or call me by value (Worth)."

But I can't find a reliable attribution.

[edit - see other comment, apparently said by Adriaan van Wijngaarden not Wirth]

ChuckMcM• 3 years ago

From a comment I left on Mastodon:

He gave a talk at the CHM (He was inducted as a fellow in 2004) I got to talk with him and was really struck by someone who had had such a huge impact was so approachable. When another person in the group challenged Modula-2 he listened respectfully and engaged based on the the idea that the speakers premise was true, then nicely dissented based on objective observations. I hope I can always be that respectful when challenged.

_ph_• 3 years ago

A sad day. He was a titan of computing and still deserved even more attention that the got. If his languages had been more prevalent in software development, a lot of things would be in a better shape.

After playing around a bit with Basic on the C64/128, Pascal became my first "real" programming language I learned. In the form of UCSD Pascal on Apple II at my school as well as Turbo Pascal 3.0 on a IBM PC (no AT or any fanciness yet). Actually a Portable PC with a build-in amber CRT.

When I got my Amiga 500, Modula 2 was a very popular language on the Amiga and actually the M2Amiga system was the most robust dev env. I still think fondly of that time, as Modula 2 made it so easy to develop structured and robust programs. The module concept was quite ahead of the time, while the C world kept recompiling header files for so many years to come. Today, Go picked up a lot from Modula 2, one reason I immediately jumped onto it. Not by chance, Robert Griesemer was a student of Wirth.

During the 90ies, while MS Dos was still used, Turbo Pascal still was the main go-to language on the PC for everyone, as it was powerful, yet approachable for non-fulltime software developers. It picked up a lot of extensions from Modula 2 too and also had a nice Object system. It peaked at the version 6 and 7. Probably to the day my favorite development environment, partially because of the unmatched speed of a pure character based UI. And Turbo Pascal combined the nice development environment with a language which found a great compromise between power and simplicity.

Unfortunately, I was only vaguely familiar with his later work on Oberon. I ran the Oberon system natively on my 386 for some toying around. It was extremely impressive with its efficiency and full GUI in the time of DOS on the PC. A pity, it didn't achive more attention. Probably it would have been very successful if it had gained tracking in the not too late 80ies, in the early 90ies of course Windows came along.

From a puristic point of view, the crowning achievement was of course when he really earned the job title of a "full stack developer", not only designing Oberon and the OS, but the CPU to run it as well. Very impressive and of a huge educational value.

END.

facorreia• 3 years ago

Rest in peace. I owe a lot to his work.

"Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" was a seminal book for me when I was learning about software development and it has influenced how I think about programming. Also, Pascal (in its various dialects) was my main language for many years on multiple platforms (CP/M, MS-DOS, Windows).

lispm• 3 years ago

He is a true legend.

revskill• 3 years ago

Pascal and Delphi is great example of Simplicity that works.

mkovach• 3 years ago

Now I have an excuse to write my next project in Pascal. :)

Bwahah! Bwahah!

notorandit• 3 years ago

So long, and thanks for all of the data structures and algorithms!

wormius• 3 years ago

RIP King. 2nd language I learned was Pascal (Turbo 5 then 6) in high school. Tried UCSD P-System from a family friend with corporate/educational connections on 5.25" but didn't have a manual, and this was before the internet. I could/should have tried to use the library to get books about it, but gave up.

Fond memories; I feel like the 90s kids were the last ones to really get to appreciate Pascal in a "native" (supportive, institutional) setting.

I also loved learning Oberon/Bluebottle (now A2 I guess), which I was so fascinated with. I think that and Plan 9's textual/object interface environments are super interesting and a path we could have taken (may converge to someday?)

groos• 3 years ago

Wirth taught me how to write recursive descent parsers and design languages suited to them. RIP.

zengid2• 3 years ago

ADSP podcast (named after Wirth's book) just had an episode on the history of Pascal https://adspthepodcast.com/2023/12/29/Episode-162.html

mise_en_place• 3 years ago

He was one of the most influential personalities in our field, most modern programming languages descend from and contain many of his ideas.

I_am_tiberius• 3 years ago

Here's a fantastic interview with him (in case you speak german): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:ProfessorNiklausWirth.we...

nhatcher• 3 years ago

Barely a week ago I was quoting from a paper of him here in HN, "A plea for lean software". It's been discussed here before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27661559

RIP

MelvinButtsESQ• 3 years ago

begin

  For every, there is an

end.

RIP

sedatk4• 3 years ago

I just needed a feature of Pascal yesterday in one of my Rust libraries: ranged integers. I know, you can go about it in different ways, like structs with private fields and custom constructors, or just with a new generic type. But, having the ability to specify that some integer can only be between 15..25 built-in is a fantastic language feature. That's even so with runtime bounds checking disabled because the compiler would still complain about some subset of violations.

What an innovator and a role model. I wish I can be as passionate about my work in my 80's as him.

pjmlp18• 3 years ago

Not only did Pascal (TP more precisely) taught me about systems programming with a safer language, it was also my first foray into type driven programming, learning to use the type system to express conditions not bound to happen.

Ranged numerics and enumerations were part of that.

betimsl• 3 years ago

I qofte dheu i lehte. Rest in peace brother.

dstanko• 3 years ago

Compiler construction was and is one of my all time favorite books on the matter. You can't put it down once you start, it is that good.

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...

dark-star• 3 years ago

Sad news indeed.

Didn't someone already publish a draft of his last book? I think I read that somewhere...

justinclift• 3 years ago

https://nitter.net/Bertrand_Meyer/status/1742613897675178347

jart• 3 years ago

The greatest of all quiche eaters has just passed away. May he rest in peace. https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html But seriously, PASCAL was the first programming language I loved that's actually good. Turbo Pascal. Delphi. Those were the days. We got a better world thanks to the fact that Niklaus Wirth was part of it.

Arnt• 3 years ago

I bought the Art of Computer Programming volume 4A a few years ago and didn't even start reading it. 1-3 I read when I… god, my youngest child is almost that age now.

I think tonight is the time to start on 4A, before we lose Knuth too.

And as I picked it down I noticed that, almost by coincidence, AoCP stood next to Wirth's PiM2. It wasn't intentional but it feels very right. There's a set of language books that end with Systems Programming with Modula 3, the Lua book. Thinking Forth, PiM2, then a gap, then the theory-ish section starts with five volumes of Knuth. Sigh.

hyperswine• 3 years ago

Will be missed.

rmrf100• 3 years ago

The first programming language I started to learn in college is Pascal, RIP and thank you Niklaus!

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

Still remember at 14 scrounging $$ together to buy a 2nd hand copy of a Modula-2 compiler for my Atari ST and then eagerly combing through the manual as my parents drove me home from the city. Really was a different era. Like a lot of other people who have posted here who probably came of age like me in the 80s, I went from BASIC to Pascal to Modula-2 and only picked up C later. Wirth's creations were so much a part of how I ended up in this industry. The world of software really owes him a lot.

doubloon• 3 years ago

End. in peace

hasmanean• 3 years ago

Pascal pointer notation was so logical. Dereferencing a pointer was just a caret to the right of the variable.

A double pointer was just two carets. And so on.

There was a struct symmetry about the whole thing. C broke that, especially with strict pointers.

StillBored• 3 years ago

RIP, and thanks for helping indirectly to put me on my career path.

I learned pascal fairly late in the grand scheme of things (basic->6502 assembly->C and then eventually pascal) but it was used for the vast majority of my formal CS education first by instruction, then by choice, and eventually in my first real programming job. The later pascal dialects remain IMHO far better than any other languages I write/maintain/guide others in using. Like many others of his stature it was just one of his many hits. Niklaus Wirth is one of the giants I feel the industry stands on, and I thank him for that.

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain..."

deadmarshal• 3 years ago

R.I.P Niklaus Wirth. One of the greatest men that has ever lived.

marttt2• 3 years ago

After having read some of the comments on Pascal here -- fellow HNers, what's your view on Pascal as a teaching/introductory language in 2023, for children aged 10+? Mostly thinking of FreePascal, but TurboPascal in DOSBox/FreeDOS/SvarDOS is also a possibility.

I'm also thankful for references to "timeless" Pascal books or online teaching materials that would be accessible for a 10+ year old kid who is fine with reading longer texts.

(My condolences are below, fwiw. His death is, interestingly, a moment of introspection for me, even if I'm just a hobbyist interested in small systems and lean languages.)

augustk• 3 years ago

Niklaus Wirth is most famous for Pascal but the best language is his last, namely Oberon which is both smaller and more capable than Pascal. If you are interested in a freestanding compiler (separate from the operating system Oberon), have a look at OBNC.

https://miasap.se/obnc/

cryptos• 3 years ago

I wouldn't teach Pascal any more. While the ecosystem around it is not quite dead it is not alive either. So, everything feels a bit fallen out of time. At least to me it would be demotivating to learn the Latin of computer science.

I would rather pick Python or Kotlin.

CRConrad7• 3 years ago

what's your view on Pascal as a teaching/introductory language in 2023, for children aged 10+?

I think it's still the best language to start with.

And don't let yourself be dissuaded by comments here about "no ecosystem" etc; that's BS, IMnsHO. There are tons of compilers and IDEs you could use, from Free Pascal (with or without Lazarus), via PowerPascal (IIRC) and other smaller implementations, to the old versions that Borland / Inprise / CodeGear / Idera / Embarcadero have released as freeware over the years.

vaxman• 3 years ago

He must have clicked on a video of Swift 5.9 ..those enums! https://youtu.be/pD2XZHnDKvo

I probably wouldn't have learned algorithms and data structures as[S] well without Pascal but I never learned it right until C eventually cameawrong.

PS: We still have Dr. Donald Knuth with us :)

self_awareness• 3 years ago

What I'm saddened with is that this not deserve HN's black strip bar at the top of the page.

erik_seaberg• 3 years ago

The black bar was up yesterday. I’m guessing it’s midnight to midnight Pacific time.

SushiHippie• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240104052617/https://news.ycom...

krylon• 3 years ago

Rest in peace.

progre• 3 years ago

No black bar? I think he deserves it.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

RIP, Mr. Wirth.

Pascal was the first programming language I ever learned, and a book on it that he coauthored was the first programming book I ever purchased. I hold him (and Pascal) in a special place in my heart.

ksec2• 3 years ago

program NiklausWirth ; begin writeln('Rest in peace'); end.

This is a very sad day.

6R1M0R4CL3• 3 years ago

sad. after learning basic on a zx81 my father found thrown out in the trashbin (i still have that machine today) my parents got me a 8088 PC. when my friends were playing games on those atari st and amiga machines, i was progrmaming in turbo pascal 3.0 i found from a cheap book that came with a 5"14 floppy. pascal is the first true language i learned and i would probably not be coding today without Niklaus. he changed my life, and he had a huge, huge impact on computing : pascal, oberon. delphi, and many more things. i will miss him dearly.

Niklaus Wirth has died

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