Posted on 02/23/2024 5:32:37 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
Pascal, the programming language he created in the early days of personal computing, offered a simpler alternative to other languages in use at the time.
He wasn’t nearly as well known as programmers such as Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. But to legions of computer scientists Dr. Wirth was one of the most influential and inspiring scientists of the early computer age.
The Association for Computing Machinery honored Dr. Wirth in 1984 with the Turing Award. Other recipients have included Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Vinton G. Cerf, who wrote the code that powers communication on the internet.
For Dr. Wirth, simplicity was paramount in computing, and he created Pascal — named after Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician and calculator inventor — as a simpler alternative to languages like BASIC, which he deemed too cumbersome.
BASIC forced programmers to “jump all over the place, writing spaghetti code,” Philippe Kahn, a former student of Dr. Wirth’s, told New York Times reporter Steve Lohr in an interview for his book “Go To” (2001)..
“Pascal forced people to think clearly about things and in terms of data structures,” Mr. Kahn said: “Wirth’s influence is extremely deep because so many of the people who were taught in real computer science programs learned Pascal. It was the language of classical thinking in computing.”
Dr. Wirth evangelized for simplicity in a seminal essay for Computer magazine in 1995. “Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication,” he wrote, “which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
A big name in Computing. RIP.
LOL! Great story!
We get so many great stories from all of our FRiends, don’t we?
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