Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus E. Wirth (born February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, known for being the designer of widely known programming languages, as Pascal, and the developer of some classic topics in software engineering.

Biography

Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland. In 1959 he earned a degree in Electronics Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. In 1960 he earned an M.Sc. from Université Laval, Canada. Then in 1963 he was awarded a Ph.D.in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by the computer designer pioneer Harry Huskey.

From 1963 to 1967 he served as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zurich. Then in 1968 he became Professor of Informatics at ETH in Zurich, taking a two year sabbatical at Xerox PARC in California.

Works

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the Lilith and Oberon operating systems, and for the Lola digital hardware design and simulation system. He received the ACM Turing Award for the development of these languages.

His article Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, about the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classical text in software engineering. In 1975 he wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide recognition and is still useful today.

He designed the simple programming language PL/0 to illustrate compiler design. It has formed the basis for many university compiler design classes.

In 1995, he popularized the adage now known as Wirth's law: "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster".

Wirth retired in 1999.

Quotes

"Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way ('Ni-klows Wirt'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nick-les Worth'. This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value."

"Make everything as simple as possible but not simpler."

Trivia

Philippe Kahn, reknown wireless and software technologist, and founder of Borland, studied under Wirth at the ETH Zürich.

External links and references

Biography at ETH Zürich.
Personal home page at ETH Zürich.
Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, Communications of the ACM, 14(4):221–227, April 1971.
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 about the Oberon language and Operating System is now available as a PDF file. Project Oberon - The Design of an Operating System and Compiler The PDF file has an additional appendix Ten Years After: From Objects to Components.
The book Compiler Construction

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Biography

Works

Quotes

Trivia

External links and references