[Obituary] Niklaus Wirth, developer of the programming language 'Pascal', dies at the age of 89. He was a pioneer in software design, devised multiple programming languages, and won the Turing Award in 1984.
Niklaus Wirth, the developer of the programming language `` Pascal '', passed away on January 1, 2024. He was 89 years old.
RIP: Software design pioneer Niklaus Wirth • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/niklaus_wirth_obituary/
We lost a titan of programming languages, programming methodology, software engineering and hardware design. Niklaus Wirth passed away on the first of January. We mourn a pioneer, colleague, mentor and friend.
— Bertrand Meyer (@Bertrand_Meyer) January 3, 2024
Mr. Wirth received a doctorate in information engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. Later, while working as an assistant professor at Stanford University and the University of Zurich, he developed two programming languages: ' Euler ' in 1965 and ' PL360 ' in 1966. In 1970, Pascal was introduced as an educational programming language.
Pascal was hailed as an easy-to-understand and simple programming language at the time. Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean also revealed that the first programming language he used seriously was Pascal.
Very sad to hear. ???? He made many enormous contributions to the field of computing. Pascal was the first language I used seriously (initially on the UCSD p-System and later via Turbo Pascal), and I got my hands on this great book that he wrote when I was in middle school.
— Jeff Dean (@????) (@JeffDean) January 4, 2024
I… pic.twitter.com/jjEVnkrROv
Even after announcing Pascal, Mr. Wirth continued to develop programming languages such as `` Modula '' and `` Oberon '', and in 1984 he won the Turing Award, which is given to a person who has made great achievements in the field of computer science. In addition, the saying left by Mr. Wirth, ``Software slows down faster than hardware speeds up,'' is widely known as ``Wird's Law.''
Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, posted on X (former Twitter), ``Mr. Wirth's research led to the development from machine language to modern programming languages.'' We praise his achievements.
He basically defined my lifelong career. May we mourn his passing but also celebrate his massive contributions to computing. That we proceeded from simple apes (machine languages) to modern humanity (plethora of modern programming languages) owes a lot to his research.
— Satoshi Matsuoka (@ProfMatsuoka) January 4, 2024
In addition, Raph Levien, who studies font rendering at Google, posted a photo of himself being encouraged by Mr. Wirth when he was 13 years old, showing his gratitude to Mr. Wirth.
In addition, Mr. Wirth was interviewed by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) about winning the Turing Award in 2019, and talked about his career and the development history of Pascal. You can check the content of the 1 hour 42 minute interview in the video below.
Niklaus Wirth, 1984 ACM Turing Award Recipient - YouTube
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