Software

niklaus wirth, dead at 89

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Niklaus Wirth in 2005

When people think of software language creators, they think of (if they even bother) Dennis Ritchie for C back in the 1960s, or Bjarne Stroustrup for C++ in the 1980s. One of the most powerful language designers and creators was Niklaus Wirth. Quoting from his Wikipedia page;

Wirth was the chief designer 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 was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardware design and simulation system.

He was most notable to me for Pascal, which I was introduced to when I purchased a copy of Borland’s Turbo Pascal for DOS in the early 1980s. I continued to use it through Borland Pascal for Windows when Windows 3.1 was introduced because Borland Pascal had full support for Windows. I was later to move away from Borland Pascal to Borlando C++ in large part because of Borlando’s OWL (Object Windows Library) application framework. I still miss Borland C++ to this day because of the powerful IDE that came as part of the complete development package. But the industry, especially Windows and Unix development, was moving towards C and C++ development, with Java thrown into the computer language mix when Java was first introduced in 1995.

I’ve often wondered how software development might have turned out if Pascal had remained central to software development (and continued to evolve) instead of slowly fading as more of a niche language. To paraphrase a certain movie, Pascal wasn’t as clumsy or random as C++, but an elegant language for a more civilized age.

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