Niklaus Wirth passed away on 1 January 2024.
He was born in Switzerland on 15 February 1934, started his undergraduate studies in Computer Science at ETH Zürich, his Masters at the Université Laval in Quebec and got his PhD at the University of Berkeley in 1963.
Niklaus Wirth is known as the designer of programming languages such as Euler (in 1965), PL360 (in 1966), ALGOL W (in 1966), Pascal (in 1970), Modula (in 1975), Modula-2 (in 1978), Oberon (in 1987), Oberon-2 (in 1991) and Oberon-07 (in 2007).
In 1984, he received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award for the development of these languages. In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM. In other words, he was the equivalent of a Nobel Prize winner for us, Computer Scientists.
For me, he was more than that. I always loved programming and I had a special interest for different kinds of programming languages and paradigms. Niklaus Wirth, as a programming language inventor, held a special place in my heart (and brain), together with people such as John McCarthy, Dennis Ritchie and Bjarne Stroustrup.
I never programmed in Euler, PL360 or ALGOL W. But I have to say that Pascal, which I discovered using Turbo Pascal 1.0 in 1988 (36 years ago!!!), was one of the most beautiful prose I had ever seen:
program Hello;
begin
writeln ('Hello, world.');
end.
The semicolon was marvellous (and it was a separator unlike in C where it is a terminator — so, strictly speaking, the one after the writeln is not needed. I loved the begin and the end. This was my first glimpse of structured programming (after having been exposed to spaghetti BASIC).
In 1989, I opted for Computer Science at School Certificate level. I did it privately. For my project, I submitted two programmes: a Mastermind game where one could play against the computer and an encryption / decryption program for files. I wrote both in Pascal which I had discovered and loved one year before.
And, ironically, both programs were rejected by the RCC Computer Science teacher because, well, he did not know evolved programming languages such as Pascal.
Still, I came out first in Computer Science in Mauritius in 1989 but I had to submit a crap program which I had written when I was in Form III. It was in BASIC.
Mauritius has not evolved much in terms of teaching. Schools (including universities) tend to always look backwards instead of trying to imagine and create the future.
Oh well.
Farewell Niklaus Wirth.
