I think his talent for language design is undisputed. But his talent for writing easily equals his talent in programming, e.g., I never came across any work of

I think his talent for language design is undisputed. But his talent for writing easily equals his talent in programming, e.g., I never came across any work of Wirth that was not well written and contained interesting insights. A couple of years back, I came across the very interesting paper "Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass" (2005) http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/Articles/GoodIdeas_origFig.pdf http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/Articles/GoodIdeas_origFig.... which is probably not as Wirth-esque as his books, but still an interesting review of what happend in our discipline, looking back.