He won computer-science boffinry's highest possible gong
why must british journalists write like this? even in an obituary!
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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C'mon, this is El Reg you are talking about here.
He won computer science ** highest possible **.
I wrote this elsewhere:
He brought me much joy in tinkering, first with Pascal, then with Oberon.
In looking up and then reading that article, I discovered that not only has Oberon been actively maintained, but that there is a successor, A2. Now that I'm back to being a hobbyist, I look forward to more joyful tinkering courtesy of his great mind.
Edit: in the course of further investigation, I found many dead links. But I also found this A2 repository that shows activity from as recently as 2 months ago.
Pascal is so incredibly good and simple that I was writing programs (sort of, half of the time it was gibberish) in it when I was 7 years old and what helped a lot was that at the time Turbo Pascal came with lots of cool examples/tutorials, so you could just play around with code snippets until you figure it out on your own. Those who witnessed how programming can be taught today to 7~10 year olds using JS or Python might relate, Pascal was just that simple and clean.
Delphi was also amazing, it had the same simplicity of Visual Basic to make GUI apps while featuring a much better and more rigourous language.
Relevant, a piece by the professor, back in 1995, "A Plea for Lean Software"
It's been so long since I first read that that I forgot about this section:
Operation activation
Another example that illustrates our strategy is the activation of operations. Programs are not executed in Oberon; instead, individual procedures are exported from modules. If a certain module M exports a procedure P, then P can be called (activated) by merely pointing at the string M.P appearing in any text visible on the display, that is, by moving the cursor to M.P and clicking a mouse but- ton. Such straightforward command activation opens the following possibilities:
- Frequently used commands are listed in short pieces of text. These are called tool-texts and resemble customized menus, although no special menu software is required. They are typically displayed in small viewers (windows).
- By extending the system with a simple graphics editor that provides captions based on Oberon texts, commands can be highlighted and otherwise decorated with boxes and shadings. This results in pop-up and/or pull-down menus, buttons, and icons that are “free” because the basic command activation mechanism is reused.
- A message received by e-mail can contain commands as well as text. Commands are executed by the recipient’s clicking into the message (without copying into a special command window). We use this feature, for example, when announcing new or updated module releases. The message typically contains receive commands followed by lists of module names to be downloaded from the network. The entire process requires only a few mouse clicks.
Anyone remember the Melissa worm? Or perhaps been negatively affected by clicking a link in an email?
Every convenience comes at a cost. I wonder if he ever revisited that concept with an eye to how similar capabilities became the bane of our existence.
Pascal, turbo Pascal and Delphi were my earliest real programming experiences making commercial software (the ability to inline assembly code in turbo Pascal was very good.)
It really was an excellent introduction to programming.
But then I switched to properly multithreadded object oriented programming, which Pascal was not so good at.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Obit Swiss computer scientist Professor Niklaus Wirth died on New Year's Day, roughly six weeks before what would have been his 90th birthday.
As described in C H Lindsey's History of ALGOL-68 [PDF], when the ALGOL-W proposal was rejected, Wirth resigned from the committee, contributing a strong "Closing Word" to the November 1968 Algol Bulletin 29, containing gems such as:
His own languages were successful, in research and also commercially – Delphi is still on sale, and the Free Pascal project just released Version 3.0 of its cross-platform Lazarus IDE.
You can get a hint of the relationship between the leaders of the rival ALGOL proposals from the way that Van Wijngaarden introduced Wirth on stage at the International Federation for Information Processing congress in 1965.
The Oberon System is a sort of existence proof of how software can be very capable while being almost unbelievably tiny: the inner, outer and systools archives from the 2013 edition total some 4,623 lines of code, in 262kB of text.
In his work, the languages and tools he created, in his eloquent plea for smaller, more efficient software – even in the projects from which he quit – his influence on the computer industry has been almost beyond measure.
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