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Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal programming language, author of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", and more, passed away on January 1. Wirth's law, named after him, is an adage which states that software gets slower more rapidly than hardware gets faster. 28 comments
@Auxonic @shawnhooper Borland's Turbo Pascal was the first compiled language that I used professionally. @human3500 @Auxonic @shawnhooper it's still kicking ass. Check out the FreePascal project. Actually have one of the best wasm implementations of any language. @matthewp @Auxonic @shawnhooper I probably only wrote software for a living for ten or fifteen years and that was a bit of time ago. We actually had our own Pascal language to program our product.   @shawnhooper didn't know about it, and I have been learning Pascal because of some classes. :neocat_pensive:
 @shawnhooper Pascal was my second programming language after BASIC. I am who I am thanks to this guy @shawnhooper oh man i remember that book when i was a kid. his law is very true and VERY dissapointing.  @shawnhooper That was the textbook for my EECS 380 course. I owe a lot to the foundations laid out there. @shawnhooper one of my earliest contributions to what we now call open source was an effort to port a Pascal compiler from a CDC mainframe to a DEC minicomputer. I think I still have my copy of the Pascal programming book. There were giants in those days and he was among them. @MartyFouts @shawnhooper Thank you for that work. I never got a chance to use it in the end, but I was so glad it was there. I always wondered if it was possible to write some kind of DCL to Pascal converter.  @shawnhooper Sorry to hear that. Saw him live in a university lecture decades ago where he talked (iirc) about the #Oberon system. A true legend. Being a #C guy, and not being into B&D, I always hated his programming languages, though.  @shawnhooper @shawnhooper I must be one of the many thousands that got exposed to #Pascal (a serious language) after starting with the #zxspectrum #basic RIP, one more beacon in my life's journey goes dark. @shawnhooper Pascal was taught at school when I was 15 and my first contact with programming. It made its mark. @DanielEriksson We touched on it briefly in high school. Unfortunately they decided mainly to teach us Visual Basic.  @shawnhooper @pixel that sucks. Wirth was a huge influence on my early development as a software engineer. Both Pascal and the Modula family. 😢  @shawnhooper Pascal was my second computing language and it’s still the best. My first was BASIC on punch cards.  |
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@shawnhooper I read once that he said that Europeans passed him by reference (pronouncing his name correctly) while Americans pass him by value (pronouncing it as "Nickel's Worth")