28 ms·

Niklaus Wirth has died

1902 points by aarroyoc 3y ago

neilv 3y ago
I don't see obituaries yet. In the meantime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth
kragen 3y ago
begin this is terrible news; is there a better source than twitter (edit: https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html 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 3y ago
  No better source yet, I think. But it is the real account of Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel language.
  - kragen 3y 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
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Since Twitter is suppressing the visibility of tweets that link outside their site I think it would be perfectly fair to block links to twitter, rewrite them to nitter, etc. There also ought to be gentle pressure on people who post to Twitter to move to some other site. I mean, even I've got a Bluesky invite now.
      - rileyphone 3y ago
        Please don't make dang do more work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847048
      - kragen 3y ago
        bluesky seems like the site for people who think that the problem with twitter was that the wrong billionaire gets to decide which ideas to suppress (admittedly you could make the same criticism of hn; it certainly isn't decentralized and resilient against administrative censorship like usenet was)
        PaulHoule 3y ago
        Well I didn't mean to just endorse Bluesky but call it out as one of many alternatives. I'm actually active on Mastodon but I am thinking about getting on Instagram as well because the content I post that does the best on Mastodon would fit in there.
        kragen 3y ago
        it won't surprise you to learn that i like mastodon but haven't used it in months
        zilti 3y ago
        Do you know about Pixelfed?
        PaulHoule 3y ago
        Yep. I interact w/ Pixelfed users on Mastodon all the time,
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - johndoe0815 3y 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 https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html
    - kragen 3y ago
      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.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/ 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
- Qem 3y 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.
  - kragen 3y 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
    - nerpderp82 3y ago
      I had wanted to interview Val Schorre [1], and looked him up on a business trip because I was close. Died 2017, seems like a righteous dude. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/venturacountystar/name/dewey-schorre-obituary?id=10116067 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/venturacountystar/name/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/META_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/META_II
      - kragen 3y ago
        yeah, i wish i had had the pleasure of meeting him. i reimplemented meta-ii 3½ years ago and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the parsing problem. it's the most powerful non-turing-complete 'programming language' i've ever used http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py (i mean i would recommend reimplementing it, not using my reimplementation; it takes a few hours or days) after i wrote it, the acm made all old papers, including schorre's meta-ii paper, available gratis; they have announced that they also plan to make them open-access, but so far have not. still, this is a boon if you want to do this. the paper is quite readable and is at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800257.808896 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800257.808896
- yawaramin 3y ago
  Martin Odersky, creator of the Scala language and Wirth's student, also seems to believe it: https://twitter.com/odersky/status/1742618391553171866 https://twitter.com/odersky/status/1742618391553171866
- nerpderp82 3y 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.
  - kragen 3y 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
    - nerpderp82 3y ago
      I wasn't trying to compare them in any other way other than, that Henry Baker is still with us.
      - kragen 3y ago
        cool, sorry if i came across as confrontational
- rollcat 3y 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.
  - kragen 3y ago
    who are today's new great minimalists?
    - rollcat 3y ago
      In no particular order: 100r.co, OpenBSD (& its many individual contributors such as tedu or JCS), Suckless/9front, sr.ht, Alpine, Gemini (&gopher) & all the people you can find there, Low Tech Magazine, antirez, Fabrice Bellard, Virgil Dupras (CollapseOS), & many other people, communities, and projects - sorry I don't have a single comprehensive list, that's just off the top of my head ;)
      - kragen 3y ago
        i... really don't think kris de decker is on niklaus wirth's level. i don't think he can write so much as fizzbuzz fabrice bellard is wirth-level, it's true. not sure about tedu and jcs, because i'm not familiar enough with their work. it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare you're comparing kindergarten finger paintings to da vinci you said wirth was "far from the last" apostle of simplicity. definition of apostle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle
        rollcat 3y ago
        > it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare You're the one trying to directly compare achievement, not me. If you're looking for top achievers, I'd have to name PHP or systemd, and THAT would be out of place ;) I even said "in no particular order", because I don't think any two can be easily compared. My main criterion for inclusion was the drive for simplifying technology, and publishing these efforts: > An apostle [...], in its literal sense, is an emissary. The word is [...] literally "one who is sent off" [...]. The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation. Every single project, person, or community I've named here has some form of web page, blog, RSS feed, papers/presentations, and/or source code, that serve to carry their messages. Achievement can be measured, simplicity can only be appreciated.
- tahnyall 3y ago
  It's OK on Hacker News to dis a reputable news source now?
- bumbledraven 3y 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_scientist%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_%28computer_s...
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Some would dispute the "built for humans to understand". Whitney's work is brilliant, but it's far less accessible than Wirth's.
    - bumbledraven 3y ago
      The point of Whitney's array languages is to allow your solutions to be so small that they fit in your head. Key chunks should even fit on one screen. A few years ago, Whitney reportedly started building an OS using these ideas (https://aplwiki.com/wiki/KOS https://aplwiki.com/wiki/KOS).
      - vidarh 3y ago
        I'm aware of the idea. I'm also aware that I can read and understand a whole lot of pages of code in the amount of time it takes me to decipher a few lines of K for example, and the less dense codes sticks far better in my head. I appreciate brevity, but I feel there's a fundamental disconnect between people who want to carefully read code symbol by symbol, who often seem to love languages like J or K, or at least he better able to fully appreciate them, and people like me who want to skim code and look at the shape of it (literally; I remember code best by its layout and often navigate code by appearance without reading it at all, and so dense dumps of symbols are a nightmare to me) I sometimes think it reflects a difference between people who prefer maths vs languages. I'm not suggesting one is better than the other, but I do believe the former is a smaller group than the latter. For my part I want grammar that makes for a light, casual read, not having to decipher. I want to be able to get a rough understanding with a glance, and gradually fill in details, not read things start to finish (yes, I'm impatient) A favourite example of mije is the infamous J interpreter fragment, where I'd frankly be inclined to prefer a disassembly over the source code. But I also find the ability to sketch out such compact code amazing. I think Wirths designs very much fit in the languages that are skimmable and recognisable by shape and structure category. I can remember parts of several of Wirths students PhD theses from the 1990s by the shape of procedures in their Oberon code to this day. That's not to diminish Whitney's work, and I find that disconnect in how we process code endlessly fascinating, and regularly look at languages in that family because there is absolutely a lot to learn from them, but they fit very different personalities and learning styles.
- vidarh 3y 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)
  - kragen 3y 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
- usr1106 3y ago
  > tex is written in pascal; Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures https://youtu.be/jbrMBOF61e0 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 3y ago
    > Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Of course https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/
    - usr1106 3y ago
      Nice. Although "latest news" are from 2021.
      - renewedrebecca 3y ago
        It's not like Pascal changes a whole lot.
      - badsectoracula 3y ago
        Free Pascal does very infrequent releases though the compiler is under active development and even has a bunch of new features both for the compiler (e.g. a wasm backend) and the language itself. There are always multiple daily commits in the git log by several developers.
      - anta40 3y ago
        The discussions in Gitlab are still active: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues Of course, you can always build the latest version from Git.
- rramadass 3y 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.
AlbertCory 3y ago
I'm happy to say I got to meet him, thanks to Charles Simonyi. May his memory be a blessing.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I was at the session he did at CERN back in 2004, but sadly never managed to talk to him.
msie 3y ago
R.I.P.
pengaru 3y ago
RIP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
formerly_proven 3y ago
end;
- boznz 3y ago
  end.
nobleach 3y ago
I owe a debt of gratitude to him and the Pascal programming language. Sincerest condolences to those he left behind.
bitwize 3y ago
Time for a black bar on the front page. Wirth had been around since forever, influencing how we and generations before us program.
khazhoux 3y 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.
- pjmlp 3y 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 3y 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.
    - merelysounds 3y ago
      I wouldn’t describe Delphi as low code, it is an IDE. Wikipedia also describes it like this[1] and does not include it in its list of low code development platforms[2]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software) [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-code_development_platforms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-code_development...
      - auselen 3y ago
        It was a RAD platform though. From following your links: > Low-code development platforms trace their roots back to fourth-generation programming language and the rapid application development tools of the 1990s and early 2000s. > Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal.
gjvc 3y ago
now would be a good time read this in his memory https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0 One of the greats.
kleiba 3y ago
@HN: Black banner, please?
- adamnemecek 3y ago
  If there was ever a reason for one, this is it.
  - wiz21c 3y ago
    Double on this.
  - bcantrill 3y 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 3y ago
  YES.
- erikpukinskis 3y 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.
  - froh 3y ago
    for computer science, Nikolaus Wirth was not simply "someone" and a black ribon signifies a great loss, not a tragedy.
  - 3y ago
eatonphil 3y ago
I loved the book Compiler Construction. Wirth's emphasis on minimalism is a huge inspiration.
- munificent 3y 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.
  - eatonphil 3y ago
    That's the other one I keep hearing about, must read it.
  - ufo 3y 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 3y 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/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/modelimplementat0000wels/page/n9...
  - pdw 3y ago
    Here's my transcription of that book: https://2k38.be/misp/ 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 3y 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."
- phooda 3y ago
  He was the go to guy for witty comments.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    Dijkstra would consider that one harmful. In America we consider Wirth the to go guy for witty takeaways.
    - vram22 3y ago
      Yogi Berra would love you.
    - vram22 3y ago
      Yes, Macs do have some worth, though they are harmful. We should take them away.
    - vram22 3y ago
      worthy takeaways
    - tomcam 3y ago
      Sweet! Annoyed I didn’t think of that one
  - vram22 3y ago
    Goto the top of the class.
- wiz21c 3y ago
  Best CS pun ever. Thanks for sharing !!!
pjmlp 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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"?)
    - kragen 3y ago
      he very well might, dave. i miss talking to you
- frognumber 3y 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.
  - marttt 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- kragen 3y ago
  i hope you are! we miss you
- cscheid 3y 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.
  - frognumber 3y ago
    Supported cooperative multitasking won in the end. It just renamed itself to asynchronous programing. That's quite literally what an 'await' is.
    - kragen 3y ago
      async/await has the advantage over cooperative multitasking that it has subroutines of different 'colors', so you don't accidentally introduce concurrency bugs by calling a function that can yield without knowing that it can yield i think it's safe to say that the number of personal computers running operating systems without preemptive multitasking is now vanishingly small as i remember it, oberon didn't support either async/await or cooperative multitasking. rather, the operating system used an event loop, like a web page before the introduction of web workers. you couldn't suspend a task; you could only schedule more work for later
tibbydudeza 3y ago
A giant of the programming language field. My first programming language was Pascal (Borland) before I got introduced to C.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Sunspark 3y ago
RIP GOAT.
- switchbak 3y ago
  The passing of a titan like he was deserves a little more respect than simply saying: "RIP GOAT".
  - hooverd 3y ago
    Rest in peace, greatest of all time.
  - bregma 3y ago
    So it goes.
omoikane 3y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful#cite_ref-6
- tommsy64 3y 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/EWD1308.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1... PDF - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF
  - bb88 3y ago
    And it continues to this day!
abc_lisper 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- blast 3y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858993
  - dvaun 3y ago
    What conference was it? Edit: Nvm, saw your other comment[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858993
Qem 3y 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.
- kragen 3y ago
  minor quibble: dr. wirth had a doctorate from berkeley
squarefoot 3y 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.
vidarh 3y 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 3y 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.
nerpderp82 3y ago
Damn.
throw_m239339 3y ago
RIP, a great loss for computer science. Some people here are recommending greats books he wrote, definitely worth reading.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
A great loss. I cherish my copy of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". I re-read it every couple of years.
bhaak 3y 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 3y ago
  which languages? I've just restored an Amiga 500 with Workbench 2.1 and I'd love to honor his memory.
  - mkesper 3y ago
    Modula2 was available and got used on Amiga. Silly teenager me found such high level languages "cheating" at the time.
    - greggman7 3y ago
      Lords of the Rising Sun was written in Modula2 on the Amiga https://www.google.com/search?q=lords+of+the+rising+sun https://www.google.com/search?q=lords+of+the+rising+sun My understanding (please correct me) is that Turbo Pascal on PC was actually Modula2 ?
      - linsomniac 3y ago
        The recent discussion here about Turbo Pascal commenters said it was written in assembly. Seems to be supported by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
        greggman7 3y ago
        I'm not suggesting Turbo Pascal was written in Modula2, I'm saying it implemented Modula2, not Pascal. Modula2 is a superset of Pascal. Pascal never had modules AFAIK but Turbo Pascal did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2
googamooga 3y 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.
madamelic 3y 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?
- kragen 3y 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
  - madamelic 3y 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.
    - kragen 3y ago
      oh, i guess you could say he was bdflish
submeta 3y 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.
froh 3y 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 3y ago
May he and his work be forever remembered.
throw7 3y ago
RIP. After Basic (on a commodore), I learned Pascal (turbo pascal) in high school of all places.
anticensor 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 https://mastodon.online/@raph/111693863925852135
- de6u99er 3y ago
  Great story. Thanks for sharing.
markus_zhang 3y ago
Oh God, no! I need to read his compiler book once I completed my toy interpreter.
olvy0 3y 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 3y 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.
- ksec 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  Delphi/Object Pascal was my favorite programming environment for a long time. PL/SQL is Ada though.
fiddlerwoaroof 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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_ 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
He is a true legend.
revskill 3y ago
Pascal and Delphi is great example of Simplicity that works.
mkovach 3y ago
Now I have an excuse to write my next project in Pascal. :) Bwahah! Bwahah!
notorandit 3y ago
So long, and thanks for all of the data structures and algorithms!
wormius 3y 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 3y ago
Wirth taught me how to write recursive descent parsers and design languages suited to them. RIP.
zengid 3y 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 https://adspthepodcast.com/2023/12/29/Episode-162.html
mise_en_place 3y ago
He was one of the most influential personalities in our field, most modern programming languages descend from and contain many of his ideas.
FounderBurr 3y ago
[flagged]
I_am_tiberius 3y ago
Here's a fantastic interview with him (in case you speak german): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:ProfessorNiklausWirth.webm https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:ProfessorNiklausWirth.we...
nhatcher 3y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27661559 RIP
MelvinButtsESQ 3y ago
begin For every, there is an end. RIP
dark-star 3y ago
Sad news indeed. Didn't someone already publish a draft of his last book? I think I read that somewhere...
sedatk 3y 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.
- pjmlp 3y 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 3y ago
I qofte dheu i lehte. Rest in peace brother.
dstanko 3y 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/CompilerConstruction1.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...
justinclift 3y ago
https://nitter.net/Bertrand_Meyer/status/1742613897675178347 https://nitter.net/Bertrand_Meyer/status/1742613897675178347
jart 3y ago
The greatest of all quiche eaters has just passed away. May he rest in peace. https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html 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 3y 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hyperswine 3y ago
Will be missed.
rmrf100 3y ago
The first programming language I started to learn in college is Pascal, RIP and thank you Niklaus!
cmrdporcupine 3y 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 3y ago
End. in peace
hasmanean 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
R.I.P Niklaus Wirth. One of the greatest men that has ever lived.
marttt 3y 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 3y 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/ https://miasap.se/obnc/
- cryptos 3y 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.
- CRConrad 3y 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 3y ago
He must have clicked on a video of Swift 5.9 ..those enums! https://youtu.be/pD2XZHnDKvo 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 3y ago
What I'm saddened with is that this not deserve HN's black strip bar at the top of the page.
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  The black bar was up yesterday. I’m guessing it’s midnight to midnight Pacific time.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20240104052617/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240104052617/https://news.ycom...
krylon 3y ago
Rest in peace.
progre 3y ago
No black bar? I think he deserves it.
JohnFen 3y 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.
ksec 3y ago
program NiklausWirth ; begin writeln('Rest in peace'); end. This is a very sad day.
6R1M0R4CL3 3y 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.

1902 points by aarroyoc 3y ago

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

kragen 3y ago

begin this is terrible news; is there a better source than twitter (edit: https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html 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 3y ago
No better source yet, I think. But it is the real account of Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel language.
- kragen 3y 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
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Since Twitter is suppressing the visibility of tweets that link outside their site I think it would be perfectly fair to block links to twitter, rewrite them to nitter, etc. There also ought to be gentle pressure on people who post to Twitter to move to some other site. I mean, even I've got a Bluesky invite now.
    - rileyphone 3y ago
      Please don't make dang do more work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847048
    - kragen 3y ago
      bluesky seems like the site for people who think that the problem with twitter was that the wrong billionaire gets to decide which ideas to suppress (admittedly you could make the same criticism of hn; it certainly isn't decentralized and resilient against administrative censorship like usenet was)
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        Well I didn't mean to just endorse Bluesky but call it out as one of many alternatives. I'm actually active on Mastodon but I am thinking about getting on Instagram as well because the content I post that does the best on Mastodon would fit in there.
        kragen 3y ago
        it won't surprise you to learn that i like mastodon but haven't used it in months
        zilti 3y ago
        Do you know about Pixelfed?
        PaulHoule 3y ago
        Yep. I interact w/ Pixelfed users on Mastodon all the time,
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- johndoe0815 3y 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 https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html
  - kragen 3y ago
    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.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/ 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
Qem 3y 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.
- kragen 3y 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
  - nerpderp82 3y ago
    I had wanted to interview Val Schorre [1], and looked him up on a business trip because I was close. Died 2017, seems like a righteous dude. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/venturacountystar/name/dewey-schorre-obituary?id=10116067 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/venturacountystar/name/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/META_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/META_II
    - kragen 3y ago
      yeah, i wish i had had the pleasure of meeting him. i reimplemented meta-ii 3½ years ago and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the parsing problem. it's the most powerful non-turing-complete 'programming language' i've ever used http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py (i mean i would recommend reimplementing it, not using my reimplementation; it takes a few hours or days) after i wrote it, the acm made all old papers, including schorre's meta-ii paper, available gratis; they have announced that they also plan to make them open-access, but so far have not. still, this is a boon if you want to do this. the paper is quite readable and is at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800257.808896 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800257.808896
yawaramin 3y ago
Martin Odersky, creator of the Scala language and Wirth's student, also seems to believe it: https://twitter.com/odersky/status/1742618391553171866 https://twitter.com/odersky/status/1742618391553171866
nerpderp82 3y 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.
- kragen 3y 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
  - nerpderp82 3y ago
    I wasn't trying to compare them in any other way other than, that Henry Baker is still with us.
    - kragen 3y ago
      cool, sorry if i came across as confrontational
rollcat 3y 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.
- kragen 3y ago
  who are today's new great minimalists?
  - rollcat 3y ago
    In no particular order: 100r.co, OpenBSD (& its many individual contributors such as tedu or JCS), Suckless/9front, sr.ht, Alpine, Gemini (&gopher) & all the people you can find there, Low Tech Magazine, antirez, Fabrice Bellard, Virgil Dupras (CollapseOS), & many other people, communities, and projects - sorry I don't have a single comprehensive list, that's just off the top of my head ;)
    - kragen 3y ago
      i... really don't think kris de decker is on niklaus wirth's level. i don't think he can write so much as fizzbuzz fabrice bellard is wirth-level, it's true. not sure about tedu and jcs, because i'm not familiar enough with their work. it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare you're comparing kindergarten finger paintings to da vinci you said wirth was "far from the last" apostle of simplicity. definition of apostle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle
      - rollcat 3y ago
        > it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare You're the one trying to directly compare achievement, not me. If you're looking for top achievers, I'd have to name PHP or systemd, and THAT would be out of place ;) I even said "in no particular order", because I don't think any two can be easily compared. My main criterion for inclusion was the drive for simplifying technology, and publishing these efforts: > An apostle [...], in its literal sense, is an emissary. The word is [...] literally "one who is sent off" [...]. The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation. Every single project, person, or community I've named here has some form of web page, blog, RSS feed, papers/presentations, and/or source code, that serve to carry their messages. Achievement can be measured, simplicity can only be appreciated.
tahnyall 3y ago
It's OK on Hacker News to dis a reputable news source now?
bumbledraven 3y 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_scientist%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_%28computer_s...
- vidarh 3y ago
  Some would dispute the "built for humans to understand". Whitney's work is brilliant, but it's far less accessible than Wirth's.
  - bumbledraven 3y ago
    The point of Whitney's array languages is to allow your solutions to be so small that they fit in your head. Key chunks should even fit on one screen. A few years ago, Whitney reportedly started building an OS using these ideas (https://aplwiki.com/wiki/KOS https://aplwiki.com/wiki/KOS).
    - vidarh 3y ago
      I'm aware of the idea. I'm also aware that I can read and understand a whole lot of pages of code in the amount of time it takes me to decipher a few lines of K for example, and the less dense codes sticks far better in my head. I appreciate brevity, but I feel there's a fundamental disconnect between people who want to carefully read code symbol by symbol, who often seem to love languages like J or K, or at least he better able to fully appreciate them, and people like me who want to skim code and look at the shape of it (literally; I remember code best by its layout and often navigate code by appearance without reading it at all, and so dense dumps of symbols are a nightmare to me) I sometimes think it reflects a difference between people who prefer maths vs languages. I'm not suggesting one is better than the other, but I do believe the former is a smaller group than the latter. For my part I want grammar that makes for a light, casual read, not having to decipher. I want to be able to get a rough understanding with a glance, and gradually fill in details, not read things start to finish (yes, I'm impatient) A favourite example of mije is the infamous J interpreter fragment, where I'd frankly be inclined to prefer a disassembly over the source code. But I also find the ability to sketch out such compact code amazing. I think Wirths designs very much fit in the languages that are skimmable and recognisable by shape and structure category. I can remember parts of several of Wirths students PhD theses from the 1990s by the shape of procedures in their Oberon code to this day. That's not to diminish Whitney's work, and I find that disconnect in how we process code endlessly fascinating, and regularly look at languages in that family because there is absolutely a lot to learn from them, but they fit very different personalities and learning styles.
vidarh 3y 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)
- kragen 3y 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
usr1106 3y ago
> tex is written in pascal; Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures https://youtu.be/jbrMBOF61e0 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 3y ago
  > Is there even a maintained Pascal compiler anymore? Of course https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/
  - usr1106 3y ago
    Nice. Although "latest news" are from 2021.
    - renewedrebecca 3y ago
      It's not like Pascal changes a whole lot.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      Free Pascal does very infrequent releases though the compiler is under active development and even has a bunch of new features both for the compiler (e.g. a wasm backend) and the language itself. There are always multiple daily commits in the git log by several developers.
    - anta40 3y ago
      The discussions in Gitlab are still active: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues Of course, you can always build the latest version from Git.
rramadass 3y 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.

AlbertCory 3y ago

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

pjmlp 3y ago
I was at the session he did at CERN back in 2004, but sadly never managed to talk to him.

msie 3y ago

R.I.P.

pengaru 3y ago

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

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

formerly_proven 3y ago

end;

boznz 3y ago
end.

nobleach 3y ago

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

bitwize 3y ago

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

khazhoux 3y 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.

pjmlp 3y 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 3y 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.
  - merelysounds 3y ago
    I wouldn’t describe Delphi as low code, it is an IDE. Wikipedia also describes it like this[1] and does not include it in its list of low code development platforms[2]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software) [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-code_development_platforms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-code_development...
    - auselen 3y ago
      It was a RAD platform though. From following your links: > Low-code development platforms trace their roots back to fourth-generation programming language and the rapid application development tools of the 1990s and early 2000s. > Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal.

gjvc 3y ago

now would be a good time read this in his memory https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0 One of the greats.

kleiba 3y ago

@HN: Black banner, please?

adamnemecek 3y ago
If there was ever a reason for one, this is it.
- wiz21c 3y ago
  Double on this.
- bcantrill 3y 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 3y ago
YES.
erikpukinskis 3y 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.
- froh 3y ago
  for computer science, Nikolaus Wirth was not simply "someone" and a black ribon signifies a great loss, not a tragedy.
- 3y ago

eatonphil 3y ago

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

munificent 3y 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.
- eatonphil 3y ago
  That's the other one I keep hearing about, must read it.
- ufo 3y 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 3y 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/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/modelimplementat0000wels/page/n9...
- pdw 3y ago
  Here's my transcription of that book: https://2k38.be/misp/ 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 3y 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."

phooda 3y ago
He was the go to guy for witty comments.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  Dijkstra would consider that one harmful. In America we consider Wirth the to go guy for witty takeaways.
  - vram22 3y ago
    Yogi Berra would love you.
  - vram22 3y ago
    Yes, Macs do have some worth, though they are harmful. We should take them away.
  - vram22 3y ago
    worthy takeaways
  - tomcam 3y ago
    Sweet! Annoyed I didn’t think of that one
- vram22 3y ago
  Goto the top of the class.
wiz21c 3y ago
Best CS pun ever. Thanks for sharing !!!

pjmlp 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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"?)
  - kragen 3y ago
    he very well might, dave. i miss talking to you
frognumber 3y 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.
- marttt 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.

kragen 3y ago
i hope you are! we miss you
cscheid 3y 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.
- frognumber 3y ago
  Supported cooperative multitasking won in the end. It just renamed itself to asynchronous programing. That's quite literally what an 'await' is.
  - kragen 3y ago
    async/await has the advantage over cooperative multitasking that it has subroutines of different 'colors', so you don't accidentally introduce concurrency bugs by calling a function that can yield without knowing that it can yield i think it's safe to say that the number of personal computers running operating systems without preemptive multitasking is now vanishingly small as i remember it, oberon didn't support either async/await or cooperative multitasking. rather, the operating system used an event loop, like a web page before the introduction of web workers. you couldn't suspend a task; you could only schedule more work for later

tibbydudeza 3y ago

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

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Sunspark 3y ago

RIP GOAT.

switchbak 3y ago
The passing of a titan like he was deserves a little more respect than simply saying: "RIP GOAT".
- hooverd 3y ago
  Rest in peace, greatest of all time.
- bregma 3y ago
  So it goes.

omoikane 3y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful#cite_ref-6

tommsy64 3y 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/EWD1308.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1... PDF - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF
- bb88 3y ago
  And it continues to this day!

abc_lisper 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
blast 3y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858993
- dvaun 3y ago
  What conference was it? Edit: Nvm, saw your other comment[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858993

Qem 3y 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.

kragen 3y ago
minor quibble: dr. wirth had a doctorate from berkeley

squarefoot 3y 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.

vidarh 3y 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 3y 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.

nerpderp82 3y ago

Damn.

throw_m239339 3y ago

RIP, a great loss for computer science. Some people here are recommending greats books he wrote, definitely worth reading.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

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

bhaak 3y 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 3y ago
which languages? I've just restored an Amiga 500 with Workbench 2.1 and I'd love to honor his memory.
- mkesper 3y ago
  Modula2 was available and got used on Amiga. Silly teenager me found such high level languages "cheating" at the time.
  - greggman7 3y ago
    Lords of the Rising Sun was written in Modula2 on the Amiga https://www.google.com/search?q=lords+of+the+rising+sun https://www.google.com/search?q=lords+of+the+rising+sun My understanding (please correct me) is that Turbo Pascal on PC was actually Modula2 ?
    - linsomniac 3y ago
      The recent discussion here about Turbo Pascal commenters said it was written in assembly. Seems to be supported by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
      - greggman7 3y ago
        I'm not suggesting Turbo Pascal was written in Modula2, I'm saying it implemented Modula2, not Pascal. Modula2 is a superset of Pascal. Pascal never had modules AFAIK but Turbo Pascal did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2

googamooga 3y 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.

madamelic 3y 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?

kragen 3y 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
- madamelic 3y 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.
  - kragen 3y ago
    oh, i guess you could say he was bdflish

submeta 3y 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.

froh 3y 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 3y ago

May he and his work be forever remembered.

throw7 3y ago

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

anticensor 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 https://mastodon.online/@raph/111693863925852135

de6u99er 3y ago
Great story. Thanks for sharing.

markus_zhang 3y ago

Oh God, no! I need to read his compiler book once I completed my toy interpreter.

olvy0 3y 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 3y 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.
ksec 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Delphi/Object Pascal was my favorite programming environment for a long time. PL/SQL is Ada though.

fiddlerwoaroof 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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_ 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

He is a true legend.

revskill 3y ago

Pascal and Delphi is great example of Simplicity that works.

mkovach 3y ago

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

notorandit 3y ago

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

wormius 3y 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 3y ago

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

zengid 3y 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 https://adspthepodcast.com/2023/12/29/Episode-162.html

mise_en_place 3y ago

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

FounderBurr 3y ago

[flagged]

I_am_tiberius 3y ago

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

nhatcher 3y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27661559 RIP

MelvinButtsESQ 3y ago

begin For every, there is an end. RIP

dark-star 3y ago

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

sedatk 3y 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.

pjmlp 3y 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 3y ago

I qofte dheu i lehte. Rest in peace brother.

dstanko 3y 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/CompilerConstruction1.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...

justinclift 3y ago

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

jart 3y ago

The greatest of all quiche eaters has just passed away. May he rest in peace. https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html 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 3y 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.

deleted 3y ago

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hyperswine 3y ago

Will be missed.

rmrf100 3y ago

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

cmrdporcupine 3y 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 3y ago

End. in peace

hasmanean 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

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

marttt 3y 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 3y 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/ https://miasap.se/obnc/
cryptos 3y 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.
CRConrad 3y 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 3y ago

He must have clicked on a video of Swift 5.9 ..those enums! https://youtu.be/pD2XZHnDKvo 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 3y ago

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

erik_seaberg 3y ago
The black bar was up yesterday. I’m guessing it’s midnight to midnight Pacific time.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240104052617/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240104052617/https://news.ycom...

krylon 3y ago

Rest in peace.

progre 3y ago

No black bar? I think he deserves it.

JohnFen 3y 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.

ksec 3y ago

program NiklausWirth ; begin writeln('Rest in peace'); end. This is a very sad day.

6R1M0R4CL3 3y 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.