Niklaus Emil Wirth was a Swiss computer scientist born on February 15, 1934, and he died on January 1, 2024. He created several programming languages, including Pascal. He also helped introduce important ideas in software engineering. In 1984, he received the Turing Award, which is considered the highest honor in computer science. He was recognized for creating a series of new programming languages.

Early life and education

Niklaus Emil Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, on February 15, 1934. He was the son of Hedwig (née Keller) and Walter Wirth, who was a high school teacher. Wirth studied electronic engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zürich) from 1954 to 1958, and he received a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree. In 1960, he earned a Master of Science (M.Sc.) from Université Laval in Quebec. In 1963, he received a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from the University of California, Berkeley. His advisor was Harry Huskey, a pioneer in computer design.

Career

From 1963 to 1967, Wirth worked as an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zürich. In 1968, he became a professor of informatics at ETH Zürich. He took two one-year sabbaticals at Xerox PARC in California (1976–1977 and 1984–1985). He retired in 1999.

Although Wirth helped create 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, which helped keep updated and supported the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68, he felt frustrated by the discussions in the standards groups. He later developed his own programming languages, 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."

Programming languages

Wirth was the main creator of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He also helped create and build the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation) and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), as well as the Lola (1995) digital hardware design and simulation system.

In 1984, Wirth was given the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award for developing these languages. In 1994, he was named a Fellow of the ACM.

In 1999, he received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.

Wirth's law

In 1995, he made a saying known as Wirth's Law popular. In his 1995 paper titled "A Plea for Lean Software," he credited Martin Reiser with saying, "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

Publications

The April 1971 article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement" from Communications of the ACM is widely regarded as a classic in software engineering education. This paper was the first to clearly explain the top-down method for designing programs. Fred Brooks mentioned the article in his famous book The Mythical Man-Month. The ACM described the article as "seminal" in a brief summary about Wirth when he received his Turing Award.

The 1973 textbook Systematic Programming: An Introduction was praised in a 1974 review as a good resource for mathematicians learning about programming. The cover of the 1973 edition explained that the book was written for people who see learning systematic algorithm creation as part of their math training, not for those who only need to write simple programs occasionally. Though challenging to read, the book was still recommended for those studying numerical mathematics.

In 1974, The Pascal User Manual and Report, co-written with Kathleen Jensen, became the foundation for many programming language projects in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe.

In 1975, Wirth wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which became very well-known. Major updates of this book, titled Algorithms & Data Structures, were published in 1986 and 2004. The first edition used Pascal for examples, while later editions used Modula-2 and Oberon instead.

In 1992, Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht released the complete documentation for the Oberon operating system. A second book, written with Martin Reiser, was planned to serve as a programming guide.