Niklaus Wirth: 80th anniversary of the classic programming

February 15 marks 80 years of outstanding Swiss scientist and engineer - Niklaus Wirth, Turing Award winner - the most prestigious award in computer science, the analogue of the Nobel Prize.

The famous professor at the ETH Polytechnic School of Zurich, where Albert Einstein (1896) and John von Neumann (1923) studied.
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He is known as the author of classic Pascal (1970), but many even have no idea what happened decades later. That its development largely initiated the creation of Java and C #. That the current space satellites, the latest UAVs and the flawless quality of the Swiss railways work thanks to his brilliant engineering thought.

It was he who, with his whole life, showed the way to fight with far-fetched complexity, which not only surrounds us everywhere, but also has become a deadly disease of the current civilization.

Our era is the time of the dictatorship of militant amateurs. And in programming, the classics are also inferior to the arena of commercially disfigured industrial “pop”.

Thanks to Felix Mendelssohn, mankind estimated true greatness of JS Bach almost a hundred years after his death. Hopefully, wise Professor Niklaus Wirth - computer Bach - people will appreciate it a little bit earlier.

The anniversary of Niklaus Wirth is a very good test of competence not only for the Russian media, but also for the world.

Ruslan Bogatyrev . 02/15/2014, Moscow

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Professor Niklaus K. Wirth, author of the Pascal language, graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH (Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule) in his native Zurich (1958). At Laval University in Quebec (Canada), he received a master's degree (1960). In 1963, at the University of California at Berkeley (USA), Wirth, under the direction of Professor Harry Husky, implemented the Algol-60 extension (Euler language) and defended his dissertation. In 1963–1967 Wirth taught at Stanford University (USA). At the same time, he was invited to the international expert group IFIP Working Group 2.1, engaged in designing the language Algol-68.

In 1967, Wirth returned to his homeland and became an associate professor at the University of Zurich. In 1968, he moved to ETH Zurich, where he began to develop the Pascal language. In 1970, the first Pascal compiler was completed. In the period 1978–1981. Wirth led the project, which resulted in the development of the Modula-2 language, a 16-bit personal computer Lilith and Medos OS, oriented on it. All software, including system software, was fully implemented on Module-2. In 1984, Niklaus Wirth was awarded the Alan Turing Award (The ACM AMTuring Award), the most prestigious and honorable in the computer world, which in its significance ranks with the Nobel Prize for its great contribution to the development of programming languages ​​and for creating a personal computer. .

In the period 1986-1989. Wirth led a project to create a new Oberon language, the extensible object-oriented OS Oberon, and a 32-bit Ceres workstation. Many ideas from this project were put at the core of the Java language and technology by Sun Labs.

Since 1990, Professor Wirth has led the Computer Systems Institute at ETH Zurich. In 1999 he left for a well-deserved rest and became an honorary professor of his native ETH Zurich.

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Recommended materials
1. Detailed biography of Niklaus Wirth (PDF, 2004)
2. Niklaus Wirth in Academgorodok (2009)
3. Teaching computer science: a lost road (2002)
4. Kronos (history of one project) (2005-2014)
5. Project Oberon2005 (Virt's Great Tour to Russia) (2005)
6. Legendary Professor Wirth at the Novik-XXI Century Research and Production Center (2005)
7. Good Ideas: A Look from the Looking-Glass (2006)
8. Niklaus Wirth: The Path to Truth (2014)
9. Keep to the roots (on the 80th anniversary of Niklaus Wirth) (2014)

Video interview
1. Niklaus Wirth on Teaching Computer Science. IEEE Computer Society, 2012.

2. Google Tech Talk, 2009.

3. Interview with Niklaus Wirth, 2010. Part 1/3

4. Interview with Niklaus Wirth, 2010. Part 2/3

5. Interview with Niklaus Wirth, 2010. Part 3/3