Nicklaus Wirth: 80th anniversary of programming classic
February 15 marks 80 years of outstanding Swiss scientist and engineer - Niklaus Wirth, winner of the Turing Prize - the most prestigious award in computer science, an analogue of the Nobel.
The famous professor of the Higher Polytechnic School ETH from Zurich, where Albert Einstein (1896) and John von Neumann (1923) studied.
He is known as the author of the classic Pascal (1970), but many do not even have a clue what was decades later. That his development in many respects initiated the creation of Java and C #. That the current space satellites, the latest drones and impeccable quality Swiss railways work thanks to his brilliant engineering idea.
It was he who, with his whole life, showed the way to combat the far-fetched complexity, which not only surrounds us everywhere, but also has become a mortally dangerous disease of modern civilization.
Our era is the time of the dictatorship of militant amateurs. And in programming, the classic is also inferior to the arena of a commercially disfigured industrial pop.
Thanks to Felix Mendelssohn, mankind appreciated the true greatness of JS Bach almost a hundred years after his death. I hope that the wise professor Nicklaus Wirth - computer Bach - people will appreciate even a little earlier.
The anniversary of Niklaus Wirth is a very good test for the competence of not only the Russian media, but also the world.
Ruslan Bogatyryov . 02/15/2014, Moscow
Professor Niklaus K. Wirth, author of Pascal, graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH (Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule) in his native Zurich (1958). At Laval University in Quebec (Canada), he received a master's degree (1960). In 1963, at the University of California at Berkeley (USA), Wirth, under the direction of Professor Harry Husky, implemented the Algol-60 extension (Euler language) and defended his thesis. In 1963–1967 Wirth taught at Stanford University (USA). At the same time, he was invited to the international expert group IFIP Working Group 2.1, engaged in the design of the Algol-68 language.
In 1967, Wirth returned to his homeland and became an assistant professor at the University of Zurich. In 1968, he moved to ETH Zurich, where he began developing the Pascal language. In 1970, the first Pascal compiler was completed. Between 1978-1981 Wirth led the project, as a result of which the Modula-2 language was developed, the 16-bit Lilith personal computer and the Medos OS focused on it. All software, including system software, was fully implemented on Module-2. In 1984, Niklaus Wirth, for his great contribution to the development of programming languages and the creation of a personal computer, Lilith was awarded the Alan Turing Award (The ACM AMTuring Award) - the most prestigious and honorable in the computer world, which in its value ranks along with the Nobel Prize .
In the period 1986-1989. Wirth led a project to create a new Oberon language, an extensible object-oriented Oberon OS, and a 32-bit Ceres workstation. Many of the ideas for that project were laid by Sun Labs as the basis for the Java language and technology.
Since 1990, Professor Wirth led the Institute of Computer Systems at ETH Zurich. In 1999, he went on a well-deserved rest and became an honorary professor of his native ETH Zurich.
Recommended materials
1. Detailed biography of Niklaus Wirth (PDF, 2004)
2. Nicklaus Wirth in Akademgorodok (2009)
3. Teaching computer science: the lost road (2002)
4. Kronos (the history of one project) (2005-2014)
5. Project Oberon2005 ( Wirth’s Big Tour in Russia) (2005)
6. Legendary Professor Wirth at the Novik-XXI Century training ground (2005)
7. Good ideas: a view from Through the Looking Glass (2006)
8. Nicklaus Wirth: the path to truth (2014)
9. Stick to the roots (to the 80th anniversary of Nicklaus Wirth) (2014)
Video Interview
1. Niklaus Wirth on Teaching Computer Science. IEEE Computer Society, 2012.
2. Google Tech Talk, 2009.
3. Interview with Niklaus Wirth, 2010. Part 1/3
4. Interview with Niklaus Wirth, 2010. Part 2/3
5. Interview with Niklaus Wirth, 2010. Part 3/3