Lot's of excellent critiques and comments in this thread. Wirth has spent most of his life in an academic environment which have shaped his opinions on teachin

Lot's of excellent critiques and comments in this thread. Wirth has spent most of his life in an academic environment which have shaped his opinions on teaching programming. He believes strongly that teaching programming is most effective when students can grasp the entirety of a small language. Below are a few quotes from Wirth taken from a 2018 interview. I find myself agreeing with his opinions: On designing a programming language: "...a language designer picks ideas from others, facilities, features, and has the task of putting them into a coherent whole, into a framework. And that is less easy than people might think, because you want to have as much power in the language as possible, yet a compact structure and compact syntax. And that you can get I think only through experience with language design." On teaching a first programming language "..as I did in the Pascal times, the foundations have been laid when a person learns his first programming language. That’s the key. In order to do a good experience, you have to have a clean language with a good structure concentrating on the essential concepts and not being snowed in. That is my primary objection to the commercial languages – they’re simply too huge, and they’re so huge that nobody can understand them in their entirety. And it’s not necessary that they’re so huge." On further development of Oberon: "The incentive came from colleagues mentioning that they had learned very, very much from my book called Project Oberon, which is one of the very few describe a full system and its development in detail. That’s something in computer science that is wrong. People learn to write before they have learned reading."