Niklaus Wirth 1934-2024
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There are news that one of the pioneers of moderns programming languages, Niklaus Wirth have passed away
a week ago. Nowaday we rare see anyone writing in Pascal (or its derivative Delphi), but it was the first language
I learnt in school, back in 1997 (thank to very convenient implementations by Borland).
It seems most of languages created by Wirth were in turn based on Algol's "block" structure and to significant extent
borrowed its syntax - but then it seems like many new features were devised in the course of creating these new
languages (probably even names like Euler, Modula and Oberon are hardly remembered nowadays) - and find their way
in further and later generations of languages. Particularly we can read in Guido van Rossum recollections that he spent
summer at DEC learning Modula-2 (and 3):
What I learned there later showed up in Python's exception handling, modules, and the fact that methods explicitly contain 'self' in their parameter list.
What a great person. I really liked Pascal when I learned programming at school. Sadly, now I somewhat forgot how to program on that language.
Wirth was a very influential scientist. His ideas influenced most of the programming that came after Pascal.
For example, the := operator in Go comes from Pascal, I believe.
I refused to learn Pascal at the distance university of Hagen in 2020 and quit the computer science program
where they teach it as introduction to programming.
One year ago I had a job interview at a company that was using Delphi and was looking for a programmer
to expand their software using C#.