5 ms·
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 ev
by 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 agoHe was the go to guy for witty comments.
- wiz21c 3y agoBest CS pun ever. Thanks for sharing !!!
- the_arun 3y agoLooks like he had a good sense of humor too.
- blast 3y agoThe joke goes back to Adriaan van Wijngaarden introducing Wirth at a conference in the 1960s. I'd love to see a video of the audience reaction to that one. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063519.html https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063519...
- moritzwarhier 3y agoToday I learned (from the Wikiquote page), what an obviously socially witty person he seems to have been! > Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth. It is refreshing to see the old-fashioned trope of the genius computer scientist / software enginieer as a "foreigner to the world" being contested again and again by stories like this. Of course people like Niklaus Wirth are exceptional in many ways, so it might be that the trope has/had some grain of truth, that just does not co-correlate with the success of said person :) And of course people might want to argue about the differences betweem SE, CS and economics. After all that rambling... RIP and thank you Niklaus!
- lallysingh 3y agoACM Historian JAN Lee said he was the origin of that joke, if I recall that conversation correctly.
- vram22 3y agoI saw it stated as pronounced as Veert, somewhere, maybe in his Wikipedia or Wikiquote pages.
- nwellnhof 3y agoIt's pronounced with an ɪ like in "wit".
- vram22 3y agoOkay, either me or the ref. may have been wrong. but I distinctly remember "Veert", because it was non-intuitive to me (as the way to pronounce Wirth), as a guy who didn't know any German at the time, only English. So the ref., probably.
- housecarpenter 3y agoIt's not really wrong. There are English accents (such as Received Pronunciation) where an "ee" before an "r" is normally pronounced with an [ɪ] like in "wit". In any case, even if you pronounce the "ee" as something else like [i], "Veert" is probably still the sequence of letters that maximises the likelihood that an English speaker will understand by it something close to the true German pronunciation ([vɪʁt] or [vɪɐt]). "Virt", for example, would be read by most people as [vɜrt] (rhyming with "hurt") which to my ear is further off from the correct pronunciation compared to something like [viət].
- denton-scratch 3y ago"Veert" is correct, in the sense that it's how a German would pronounce it. Of course, the great man wasn't German; I don't know how he pronounced his own surname. "Wit" is just wrong. Perhaps that was a joke that I missed about the man's humour.
- G3rn0ti 3y ago> Of course, the great man wasn't German. He was Swiss, more exactly from the city of Winterthur located in the canton (state) of Zürich. The canton's official language is German, however. Of course, people over there speak in a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch".
- rabbits77 3y agoThe joke really only works if you use his first name! The complete joke is that "by value" means pronouncing first and last name to sound like "Nickles Worth".
- alanbernstein 3y ago"worth" alone still means "value" though
- LoveMortuus 3y agoTrue, but I believe the person above you is referring to the fact that the name sounds like nickels (coins) which are generally worth cents. :P
- coldtea 3y agoI always (and still) undestood it to just need the surname.
- ggambetta 3y agoThe way I understand it, it doesn't -- by name (aka by reference) vs by value, as in function arguments.
- ak_111 3y agoWay better interpretation that i missed!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vram22 3y agoSaid the same here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15361069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15361069 at the end of the comment.
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoThis is brilliant. It reminds me of my only meeting with Andy Tanenbaum / AAT [0], one of the smartest, nicest computer science guy I've ever met in my life. I can't recall the many puns and jokes he shared, but it was just incredible. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum