R.I.P. Niklaus Wirth

[Jurgen Keller]

On January 1, Niklaus Wirth died at the age of 89. For a long time, Mr. Wirth was a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. He designed the programming languages Pascal (1970), Modula (1980) and Oberon (1988), and the workstations Lilith (1980) and Ceres (1986), as well as their operating system.

Wirth received a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. He was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1984. Maybe you know his article "A Plea for Lean Software" or the book "Algorithms and Data Structures" or "Compiler Construction", or you remember Wirth's Law, which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

His influence is still around, for example, in the Go programming language. Robert Griesemer, one of the inventors of Go, did his doctorate under the supervision of Hanspeter Mössenböck and Niklaus Wirth on the subject of a programming language for vector computers. If you know Go and the other Wirth languages, you will notice the relationship. BTW, Mr. Griesemer grew up in a village near to mine and for two years or so, we were at the same secondary school. He and his colleague once grabbed my HP-41C and gave it back with some strange characters on the display, created by synthetic programming. After that I ordered the Wickes book which was not that easy back in those days. Good memories.

R.I.P., Niklaus Wirth, and thank you for the fish (programming languages, design principles, amazing computers, etc.). I really like your work!