Niklaus Emil Wirth (IPA: /vɛrt/) (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".[4]
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."[9]
In 1999, he received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award[19]
Wirth's law
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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."[20]
Publications
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The April 1971 Communications of the ACM article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement",
[21][22] concerning the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering.[23] The paper is considered to be the earliest work to formally outline the top-down method for designing programs.[24][25] 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.[26][27]
The 1973 textbook, Systematic Programming: An Introduction,[28] was described as a quality source for mathematicians desiring to understand the nature of programming in a 1974 review.[29] 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."[30] Described in the review as a challenging text to work through, it was nevertheless recommended as useful reading for those interested in numerical mathematics.[31]
In 1974, The Pascal User Manual and Report,[32] jointly written[i] with Kathleen Jensen,[35] served as the basis of many language implementation efforts in the 1970s (BSD Pascal[36]), and 1980s in the United States and across Europe.[37][38]
In 1975, he wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide recognition.[39] Major revisions of this book with the new title Algorithms & Data Structures were published in 1986 and 2004.[40][41] 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.[40][41]
In 1992, Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht published the full documentation of the Oberon operating system.[42] A second book, with Martin Reiser, was intended as a programming guide.[43]
^First chapter (Documentation) is a joint work, which according to Jensen has been edited by Wirth.[33] Second chapter is by Wirth (also published separately[34]).
References
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^"IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 November 2010. Retrieved 20 March 2021.
^"Niklaus Wirth 2004 Fellow". Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on 3 July 2019. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
^Gosch, John (25 October 1979). Weber, Samuel (ed.). "Wirth works to better Pascal" (PDF). Profile. Electronics. Paul W. Reiss. p. 157. ISSN 0013-5070. Archived (PDF) from the original on 20 May 2024. Retrieved 14 August 2024. [his family] includes two girls and a boy
^"Niklaus E. Wirth - A.M. Turing Award Laureate". Association for Computing Machinery. 2019. Archived from the original on 29 June 2017. Retrieved 8 January 2024.
^Henderson, Harry (2009). "Wirth, Niklaus". Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. Infobase Publishing. p. 514. ISBN 978-1-4381-1003-5.
^ abcPomberger, Gustav; Mössenböck, Hanspeter; Rechenberg, Peter (2000). "Niklaus Wirth - a Pioneer of Computer Science". The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity. Gulf Professional Publishing. p. 6. ISBN 978-3-932588-85-3.
^Jeuring, Johan; Meertens, Lambert; Guttmann, Walter (17 August 2016). "Profile of IFIP Working Group 2.1". Foswiki. Archived from the original on 8 March 2021. Retrieved 4 October 2020.
^Swierstra, Doaitse; Gibbons, Jeremy; Meertens, Lambert (2 March 2011). "ScopeEtc: IFIP21: Foswiki". Foswiki. Archived from the original on 2 September 2018. Retrieved 4 October 2020.
^"Niklaus Wirth: 2004 Fellow". Computer History Museum (CHM). Archived from the original on 3 July 2019. Retrieved 15 October 2019.
^Petzold, Charles (9 September 1996). "Programming Languages: Survivors and Wannabes". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 9 March 2018. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
^Wirth, Niklaus (3 May 2016). The Programming Language Oberon-07 (PDF). ETH Zurich, Department of Computer Science (Report). Archived (PDF) from the original on 21 January 2021. Retrieved 17 January 2021.
^Knudsen, Svend Erik (1983). Medos-2: a Modula-2 oriented operating system for the personal computer Lilith (Doctoral Thesis). ETH Zurich. doi:10.3929/ethz-a-000300091. hdl:20.500.11850/137906. Archived from the original on 4 January 2024. Retrieved 4 January 2024. I am indebted to Prof. N. Wirth for conceiving and coordinating the Lilith project, for giving me the opportunity to design and implement the operating system Medos-2, and for supervising this thesis.
^Franz, Michael (2000). "Oberon: The Overlooked Jewel". In Böszörményi, László (ed.). The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity. Gulf Professional Publishing. pp. 42, 45. ISBN 978-3-932588-85-3.
^Proven, Liam (29 March 2022). "The wild world of non-C operating systems". The Register. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
^Wirth, Niklaus (1995). Digital Circuit Design. Springer.
^Eberle, Hans (2000). "Designing a Cluster Network". In Böszörményi, László (ed.). The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity. Gulf Professional Publishing. p. 154. ISBN 978-3-932588-85-3. This class also inspired Niklaus to develop a simple yet powerful hardware description language called Lola. Niklaus has always built the systems he is either researching or teaching himself since he knows that this is the only way to keep an engineer honest and credible.
^Haigh, Thomas (1984). "Niklaus E. Wirth". A. M. Turing Award. Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on 19 September 2017. Retrieved 15 October 2019.
^"ACM Fellows by year". acm.org. Archived from the original on 3 January 2024. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
^"Outstanding Research Award". SIGSOFT. Retrieved 1 April 2024.
^Wirth, Niklaus (February 1995). "A Plea for Lean Software". Computer. 28 (2): 64–68. doi:10.1109/2.348001. S2CID 44803077.
^Wirth, Program development by stepwise refinement, Communications of the ACM,. 14:221–227, ACM Press, 1971
^Wirth, Niklaus (2001). "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement". In Broy, Manfred; Denert, Ernst (eds.). Pioneers and Their Contributions to Software Engineering. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-48354-7. ISBN 978-3-642-48355-4. S2CID 11348419.
^Gehani, Narain (1991). Ada: Concurrent Programming. Silicon Press. p. 209. ISBN 978-0-929306-08-7.
^Gill, Nasib Singh. Software Engineering. Khanna Publishing House. p. 192. ISBN 978-81-906116-3-3.
^Dooley, John F. (25 November 2017). Software Development, Design and Coding: With Patterns, Debugging, Unit Testing, and Refactoring. Apress. p. 54. ISBN 978-1-4842-3153-1.
^Brooks, Frederick P. (Frederick Phillips) (1975). The Mythical Man-Month. Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-201-00650-6.
^"Niklaus Wirth: 1984 ACM A. M. Turing Award Recipient". Communications of the ACM. 28 (2). February 1985. doi:10.1145/1283920.1283941.
^Wirth, Niklaus (8 January 1973). Systematic Programming: An Introduction. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-880369-2.
^Abrahams, Paul; Wirth, Niklaus (July 1974). "Systematic Programming: An Introduction". Mathematics of Computation. 28 (127): 881. doi:10.2307/2005728. JSTOR 2005728.
^Wirth, Niklaus (1973). "Cover flap". Systematic Programming: An Introduction. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-880369-2.
^Abrahams, Paul (July 1974). "Systematic Programming: An Introduction by Niklaus Wirth". Mathematics of Computation. 28 (127). American Mathematical Society: 881–883. doi:10.2307/2005728. JSTOR 2005728.
^"Kathleen Jensen's Speech at the Wirth Symposium (20.02.2014)". YouTube. 25 February 2014. Archived from the original on 6 January 2024. Retrieved 6 January 2024.
^Wirth, Niklaus (1973). The programming language Pascal (Revised Report) (Report). ETH Zurich. pp. 49 p. doi:10.3929/ethz-a-000814158. hdl:20.500.11850/68910.
^* https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Kathleen-Jensen-2058521472 Archived 6 January 2024 at the Wayback Machine
https://dl.acm.org/profile/81334487416 Archived 6 January 2024 at the Wayback Machine
https://dblp.org/pid/06/5848.html Archived 6 January 2024 at the Wayback Machine
^Joy, William N.; Graham, Susan L.; Haley, Charles B. (1979). Berkeley Pascal User's Manual, Version 1.1, April, 1979. University of California, Berkeley. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Archived from the original on 8 January 2024. Retrieved 8 January 2024.
^Blotnick, Srully (July 1983). "Don't Fail Me Now" (PDF). Pascal News (26): 26. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 January 2024. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
^Hartel, Pieter H. (May 1982). "Pascal for systems programmers" (PDF). ECODU-32. Archived (PDF) from the original on 22 March 2020. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
^ abWirth, Niklaus (1986). "Preface to the 1986 edition". Algorithms & Data Structures. Prentice-Hall. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-13-022005-9. The major change which pervades the entire text concerns the programming language used to express the algorithms. Pascal has been replaced by Modula-2.
^Wirth, Niklaus; Gutknecht, Jürg (1992). Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler(PDF). Addison-Wesley, ACM Press. ISBN 978-0-201-54428-2. Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 April 2013. Out of print. Online version of a 2nd edition Archived 5 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine. 2005 edition, PDF. Archived 8 July 2021 at the Wayback Machine
^Reiser, Martin; Wirth, Niklaus (1992). Programming in Oberon: Steps Beyond Pascal and Modula(PDF). Addison-Wesley, ACM Press. ISBN 978-0-201-56543-0. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 April 2016. Retrieved 1 June 2017.. Out of print.
^Proven, Liam (4 January 2024). "RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth". The Register. Archived from the original on 7 January 2024. Retrieved 6 January 2024.
Further reading
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Wirth, Niklaus (April 1971). "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement". Communications of the ACM. 14 (4): 221–227. doi:10.1145/362575.362577. hdl:20.500.11850/80846. S2CID 13214445.
Wirth, N. (1974). "On the Design of Programming Languages" (PDF). Proc. IFIP Congress 74: 386–393.
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. ISBN 3-932588-85-1, ISBN 1-55860-723-4.
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.