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."
The 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.
Today 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!
The 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".
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.
The linked tweet says "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."
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.
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.
>His stance on compiler optimizations is another example: only add optimization passes if they improve the compiler's self-compilation time.
What an elegant metric! Condensing a multivariate optimisation between compiler execution speed and compiler codebase complexity into a single self-contained meta-metric is (aptly) pleasingly simple.
I'd be interested to know how the self-build times of other compilers have changed by release (obviously pretty safe to say, generally increasing).
That's fascinating. I'd imagine there are actually two equilibria/stable states possible under this rule: a small codebase with only the most effective optimization passes, or a large codebase that incorporates pretty much any optimization pass.
A marginally useful optimization pass would not pull its weight when added to the first code base, but could in the second code base because it would optimize the run time spent on all the other marginal optimizations.
Though the compiler would start out closer to the small equilibrium in its initial version, and there might not be a way to incrementally move towards the large equilibrium from there under Wirth's rule.
> ... 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 peripherals.
I first wrote it as "worthwhile", but then the pun practically fell out of the screen at me.
I love Wirth's work, and not just his languages. Also his stuff like algorithms + data = programs, and stepwise refinement. Like many others here, Pascal was one of my early languages, and I still love it, in the form of Delphi and Free Pascal.
RIP, guruji.
Edited to say guruji instead of guru, because the ji suffix is an honorific in Hindi, although guru is already respectful.
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.
I'm also a student of his, and later met him socially on a few occasions as a graduate student (in a different institute).
Undergraduate students were all in awe of him, but I got the impression that he did not particularly enjoy teaching them (Unlike other professors, however, he did not try to delegate that part of his responsibilities to his assistants). He seemed to have a good relationship with his graduate students.
In his class on compiler construction, he seemed more engaged (the students were already a bit more experienced, and he was iterating the Oberon design at the time). I remember an exchange we had at the oral exam — he asked me to solve the "dangling ELSE" problem in Pascal. I proposed resolving the ambiguity through a refinement of the language grammar. He admitted that this would probably work, but thought it excessively complex and wondered where I got that idea, since he definitely had not taught it, so I confessed that I had seen the idea in the "Dragon Book" (sort of the competition to his own textbook). Ultimately, I realized that he just wanted me to change the language to require an explicit END, as he had done in Modula-2 and Oberon.
Socially, he was fun to talk to, had a great store of computer lore, of course. He was also much more tolerant of "heresies" in private than in public, where he came across as somewhat dogmatic. Once, the conversation turned to Perl, which I did not expect him to have anything good to say about. To my surprise, he thought that there was a valid niche for pattern matching / text processing languages (mentioning SNOBOL as an earlier language in this niche).
At least several Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon-2 compilers.
My very first compiled programming language was Pascal. I got the free "PCQ Pascal" from the Fish disks as I wasn't able to get the C headers from Commodore which I would have needed for doing proper Amiga programming. Likewise later Oberon-A although I don't remember where I got that from.
There were also commercial Modula-2 and Oberon-2 compilers. I just found that the Modula-2 compiler was open sourced some years back. https://m2amiga.claudio.ch/
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;
> 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.
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)
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
> 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.
Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures 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.
> If I install TeX on my Linux machine now, is that still compiled from the original Pascal source?
If you install TeX via the usual ways–TeX Live and MikTeX are the most common—then the build step runs a program (like web2c) to convert the Pascal source (with changes) to C, then uses a C compiler. (So the Pascal source is still used, but the Pascal "compiler" is a specialized Pascal-to-C translator.) But there is also TeX-FPC (https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-fpc), a small set of change (patch) files to make TeX compilable with the Free Pascal compiler (https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm kind of a fan of Lola, an easy-to-learn HDL which was inspired by Pascal/Oberon vs. Verilog (inspired by C) and VHDL, inspired by Ada.
I like Wirth's whole software stack: RISC-5 (not to be confused with RISC-V) implemented in Lola, Oberon the language, and Oberon the environment. IIRC Lola can generate Verilog - I think the idea was that students could start with an FPGA board and create their own CPU, compiler, and OS.
I also like his various quips - I think he said something like "I am a professor who is a programmer, and a programmer who is a professor." We need more programmer/professors like that. Definitely an inspiration for systems people everywhere.
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.
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.
I learned Pascal and MODULA-2 in college, in my first two programming semesters. MODULA-2 was removed shortly afterwards but Pascal is still used in the introductory programming course. I'm very happy to have had these as the languages that introduced me to programming and Wirth occupies a very special place in my heart. His designs were truly ahead of their time.
I had Pascal and some Modula as well (on concurrent programming course).
I learned C++ later myself as a Pascal with bizzare syntax. I always felt like semantics of C++ was taken entirely from Pascal. No two lanuages ever felt closer to each other for me. Like one was just reskin of the other.
Readit News
That led him to quip, "In Europe I'm called by name, but in the US I'm called by value."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth
https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063519...
> 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!
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15361069
at the end of the comment.
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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.
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.
What an elegant metric! Condensing a multivariate optimisation between compiler execution speed and compiler codebase complexity into a single self-contained meta-metric is (aptly) pleasingly simple.
I'd be interested to know how the self-build times of other compilers have changed by release (obviously pretty safe to say, generally increasing).
It just renamed itself to asynchronous programing. That's quite literally what an 'await' is.
A marginally useful optimization pass would not pull its weight when added to the first code base, but could in the second code base because it would optimize the run time spent on all the other marginal optimizations.
Though the compiler would start out closer to the small equilibrium in its initial version, and there might not be a way to incrementally move towards the large equilibrium from there under Wirth's rule.
I think that some of the text in "16.1. General considerations" of "Compiler Construction" are sorta close, but does not say this explicitly.
Go team member, Robert Griesemer, did his Phd under Mössenböck and Wirth.
This was a fantastic talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0
He had the crowd laughing and cheering, and the audience questions in the end were absolutely excellent.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I first wrote it as "worthwhile", but then the pun practically fell out of the screen at me.
I love Wirth's work, and not just his languages. Also his stuff like algorithms + data = programs, and stepwise refinement. Like many others here, Pascal was one of my early languages, and I still love it, in the form of Delphi and Free Pascal.
RIP, guruji.
Edited to say guruji instead of guru, because the ji suffix is an honorific in Hindi, although guru is already respectful.
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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.
Undergraduate students were all in awe of him, but I got the impression that he did not particularly enjoy teaching them (Unlike other professors, however, he did not try to delegate that part of his responsibilities to his assistants). He seemed to have a good relationship with his graduate students.
In his class on compiler construction, he seemed more engaged (the students were already a bit more experienced, and he was iterating the Oberon design at the time). I remember an exchange we had at the oral exam — he asked me to solve the "dangling ELSE" problem in Pascal. I proposed resolving the ambiguity through a refinement of the language grammar. He admitted that this would probably work, but thought it excessively complex and wondered where I got that idea, since he definitely had not taught it, so I confessed that I had seen the idea in the "Dragon Book" (sort of the competition to his own textbook). Ultimately, I realized that he just wanted me to change the language to require an explicit END, as he had done in Modula-2 and Oberon.
Socially, he was fun to talk to, had a great store of computer lore, of course. He was also much more tolerant of "heresies" in private than in public, where he came across as somewhat dogmatic. Once, the conversation turned to Perl, which I did not expect him to have anything good to say about. To my surprise, he thought that there was a valid niche for pattern matching / text processing languages (mentioning SNOBOL as an earlier language in this niche).
My very first compiled programming language was Pascal. I got the free "PCQ Pascal" from the Fish disks as I wasn't able to get the C headers from Commodore which I would have needed for doing proper Amiga programming. Likewise later Oberon-A although I don't remember where I got that from.
There were also commercial Modula-2 and Oberon-2 compilers. I just found that the Modula-2 compiler was open sourced some years back. https://m2amiga.claudio.ch/
Aminet has directories for Oberon and Modula-2 related programs: https://aminet.net/dev/obero and https://aminet.net/dev/m2
this is terrible news;
is there a better source than twitter (edit: 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.
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.
But it is the real account of Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel language.
https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html
Deleted Comment
but still, it's twitter, liable to vanish or block non-logged-in access at any moment
perhaps more significant than tracemonkey was luajit, which achieves much higher performance with the tracing technique
Also Alan Kay still with us.
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
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.
Just thought about that when Donald Knuth's Christmas lecture https://www.youtube.com/live/622iPkJfYrI lead me to one of his first TeX lectures 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.
If you install TeX via the usual ways–TeX Live and MikTeX are the most common—then the build step runs a program (like web2c) to convert the Pascal source (with changes) to C, then uses a C compiler. (So the Pascal source is still used, but the Pascal "compiler" is a specialized Pascal-to-C translator.) But there is also TeX-FPC (https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-fpc), a small set of change (patch) files to make TeX compilable with the Free Pascal compiler (https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/).
For more details see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111332/how-to-compil...
Of course
https://www.freepascal.org/
No. There is another.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_%28computer_s...
but i'm sure he'd agree his achievements are not in the same league as wirth's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful#cite_ref-6
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/EWD1... PDF - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7EEWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF
[1]: https://mastodon.online/@raph/111693863925852135
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.
I like Wirth's whole software stack: RISC-5 (not to be confused with RISC-V) implemented in Lola, Oberon the language, and Oberon the environment. IIRC Lola can generate Verilog - I think the idea was that students could start with an FPGA board and create their own CPU, compiler, and OS.
I also like his various quips - I think he said something like "I am a professor who is a programmer, and a programmer who is a professor." We need more programmer/professors like that. Definitely an inspiration for systems people everywhere.
I learned C++ later myself as a Pascal with bizzare syntax. I always felt like semantics of C++ was taken entirely from Pascal. No two lanuages ever felt closer to each other for me. Like one was just reskin of the other.
Deleted Comment