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 ...
Not only the great musicians of our youth passing, so are the great scientists.
RIP Dr. Wirth. You made great contributions!
I worked at a company next door to Xerox PARC in Palo Alto where Dr. Wirth worked for a while. I was next to some greatness there and didn't even know it at the time!
Here's a Web Archive / Wayback Machine Link.
Rest In Peace, Niklaus.
Gate$ was not so much a coder as a usurper of the code of others.
“Gate$ was not so much a coder as a usurper of the code of others.”
Exactly right. Didn’t he swipe CP/M?
Pascal was probably many peoples’ first look at pre-OOP ‘structured’ programming, not the monolithic collection of subroutines that fortran was known for at the time, and BASIC was well... just too basic.
A brilliant man who accomplished a lot during a long life.
You could say he got his Nicklas Wirth.
You probably didn't know "Your Nickle's Worth" is a popular weekly here in North Idaho. I'm surprised it hangs on with Internet ads, but it's still widely used and distributed.
No, I had no idea, but that’s very interesting.
And thanks for the groan of confidence!
Q: Professor Wirth, how do you pronounce your name?
A: Well, you can address me either by name or by value ...
My favorite programming language
I met Kildall in the early 80's and asked him about his FM Encoding system used in CP/M. I asked him what the title "FM" was all about. He smiled and said: "fuc#ing Magic". A few years later he developed double-density storage that used MFM Encoding. The next time I saw him I asked what the "MFM" was for. Bigger smile from Gary: "More Fuc#ing Magic".
“Borland” — now there’s a blast from the past.
Phillipe Kahn was chairman, president, and CEO of Borland Inc. from its beginning in 1983 until 1995. Kahn was a student of Wirth.
Its first product was Turbo Pascal in 1983. Then Sidekick, Quattro Pro, Paradox database management. Borland purchased Ashton-Tate and got dBASE.
I used so many of those, but they are all distant memories now. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Pascal is a learning language, and truly beautiful. As a computer science student at university in the early 80’s, Pascal was the first language I was taught, followed by C.
Professionally I used C, then Perl over the next 30 years.
writeln (‘RIP Dr. Wirth’);
Pascal was my primary programming language but on OpenVMS and HP-UX.
I sometimes had to translate C over to (an extended) Pascal.
Think of him quite frequently on my job as I program in Delphi — Object Oriented Pascal. RIP Dr. Wirth. You made great contributions! Ditto!>>> And the article mentioned Kahn who developed delphi. I liked delphi. Didn’t work with for any production stuff.
I was a software engineer at Borland from 1994 to 2011, and I spent all of them on the Delphi team. To me it’s remarkable that such a small team was able to produce a world class development environment that exists to this day. It was an awesome experience working with such talented people.
IMHO Object Pascal is still the best programming language around, and the Delphi IDE is still miles ahead of any other especially in its visual design capabilities.
Sure, Pascal, but he's no Al Gore.
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