Computing
Niklaus Wirth
Computer scientist, Turing Award 1984, designer of Pascal
Born 1934 · Died 2024
Photo: Tyomitch · Copyrighted free use
«Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.»
Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal, the language on which a generation of programmers learned to write structured code, and several successors including Modula-2 and Oberon. He argued all his life that software should be small enough to understand completely.
Key achievements
- Designed Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon
- Turing Award, 1984, for a sequence of innovative languages
- Professor at ETH Zurich from 1968 to 1999
Universities
Zurich
Took his first degree here in 1959 and returned as professor of computer science from 1968 to 1999.
Berkeley, California
Took his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science in 1963.
Facts
- He joked that Europeans pronounced his name correctly by value while Americans called him by reference, a programming pun.
- Wirth's law states that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
- He designed an entire operating system, compiler and hardware in Oberon, small enough for one person to read in full.