Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth (IPA: Template:IPAc-en) (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist. He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, "for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages".<ref name="ACM Turing Award">Template:Cite web</ref>

Early life and education

Niklaus Emil Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, on 15 February 1934.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He was the son of Hedwig (née Keller) and Walter Wirth, a high school teacher.<ref name=HDS>Template:HDS</ref> Wirth studied electronic engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETH Zürich) from 1954 to 1958, graduating with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree.<ref name=HDS/> In 1960, he earned a Master of Science (M.Sc.) from Université Laval in Quebec.<ref name=HDS/> Then in 1963, he was awarded a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by computer design pioneer Harry Huskey.<ref name="Pioneer"/>

Career

From 1963 to 1967, Wirth served as assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zürich.<ref name=HDS/> In 1968, he became a professor of informatics at ETH Zürich, taking two one-year sabbaticals at Xerox PARC in California (1976–1977 and 1984–1985). He retired in 1999.<ref name="Pioneer">Template:Cite book</ref>

Although Wirth was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> which specified, maintains, and supports the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> he got frustrated by the discussions in the standards groups and published his languages later on as personal work, mainly Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon.

In 2004, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for seminal work in programming languages and algorithms, including Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Programming languages

File:Niklaus Wirth large.jpg

Wirth in 1969

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970),<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978),<ref name="Pioneer"/> Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007).<ref>Template:Cite report</ref> He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation),<ref>Template:Cite thesis</ref> and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation),<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and for the Lola (1995) digital hardware design and simulation system.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 1984, Wirth received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award for the development of these languages.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1999, he received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Wirth's law

In 1995, he popularized the adage now named Wirth's law. In his 1995 paper "A Plea for Lean Software" he attributed the following to Martin Reiser phrasing it as, "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Publications

The April 1971 Communications of the ACM article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement",<ref>Wirth, Program development by stepwise refinement, Communications of the ACM,. 14:221–227, ACM Press, 1971 </ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> concerning the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The paper is considered to be the earliest work to formally outline the top-down method for designing programs.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The article was discussed by Fred Brooks in his influential book The Mythical Man-Month and was described as "seminal" in the ACM's brief biography of Wirth published in connection to his Turing Award.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Template:AnchorThe 1973 textbook, Systematic Programming: An Introduction,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> was described as a quality source for mathematicians desiring to understand the nature of programming in a 1974 review.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> The cover flap, of the 1973 edition, stated the book "... is tailored to the needs of people who view a course on systematic construction of algorithms as part of their basic mathematical training, rather than to the immediate needs of those who wish to be able to occasionally encode a problem and hand it over to their computer for instant solution."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Described in the review as a challenging text to work through, it was nevertheless recommended as useful reading for those interested in numerical mathematics.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

In 1974, The Pascal User Manual and Report,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> jointly writtenTemplate:Efn with Kathleen Jensen,<ref>* https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Kathleen-Jensen-2058521472 Template:Webarchive

• https://dl.acm.org/profile/81334487416 Template:Webarchive
• https://dblp.org/pid/06/5848.html Template:Webarchive</ref> served as the basis of many language implementation efforts in the 1970s (BSD Pascal<ref name="Joy 1979">Template:Cite book</ref>), and 1980s in the United States and across Europe.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1975, he wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide recognition.<ref>Citations collected by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)</ref> Major revisions of this book with the new title Algorithms & Data Structures were published in 1986 and 2004.<ref name="ads1986">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="ads2004">Template:Cite web</ref> The examples in the first edition were written in Pascal. These were replaced in the later editions with examples written in Modula-2 and Oberon, respectively.<ref name="ads1986" /><ref name="ads2004" />

In 1992, Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht published the full documentation of the Oberon operating system.<ref name="PO">Template:Cite book Out of print. Online version of a 2nd edition Template:Webarchive. 2005 edition, PDF. Template:Webarchive</ref> A second book, with Martin Reiser, was intended as a programming guide.<ref name="PIO">Template:Cite book. Out of print.</ref>

Death

Wirth died in Zürich on New Year's Day 2024, at age 89.<ref name=HDS/><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

See also

• 21655 Niklauswirth asteroid
• Extended Backus–Naur form
• Wirth syntax notation
• Bucky bit
• Wirth–Weber precedence relationship
• List of pioneers in computer science

Further reading

• Template:Cite journal
• Template:Cite journal

External links

• Template:Official website, ETH Zürich
• Biography at ETH Zürich
• Template:DBLP
• Niklaus E. Wirth at ACM
• Turing Award Lecture, 1984
• Pascal and its Successors paper by Niklaus Wirth – also includes short biography.
• A Few Words with Niklaus Wirth
• The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity, by László Böszörményi, Jürg Gutknecht, Gustav Pomberger (editors). dpunkt.verlag; Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000. Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN.
• The book Compiler Construction
• The book Algorithms and Data Structures
• The book Project Oberon – The Design of an Operating System and Compiler. The book about the Oberon language and Operating System is now available as a PDF file. The PDF file has an additional appendix Ten Years After: From Objects to Components.
• Project Oberon 2013 Online 2nd Edition of the preceding book adapted for the reimplementation on FPGA hardware.