Niklaus Wirth: 1934-2024

Geek For Life

I first encountered Professor Wirth remotely in my first college programming course, 203 Intro to Programming. We used Pascal as our programming language. I had been programming for 6 years by then, completely by the seat of my pants, in BASIC, FORTRAN, & 6800 assembly language.

Pascal came as a shock. There were lots of things I couldn’t do in Pascal. There was a way to express a program & you’d better get used to it. So I did.

We soon got our first Unix machine, a VAX 780. I moved on to C, then LISP & Prolog, but I always remembered the utter simplicity of Pascal.

I wasn’t aware of my second encounter with Professor Wirth. 1997-1999 our family lived in Zumikon, a village outside Zürich. On the ridge above the village was a remote control airplane landing strip. We would drive by & see the guys flying planes & helicopters.

My third encounter with Professor Wirth was the one that would change my life. Toward the end of our stay in Switzerland I was invited to speak at a conference in Nice. Professor Wirth was speaking also. Somehow I found out that we shared flights so I did something I ordinarily would never do, I approached the ticket counter & said, “My colleague Professor Wirth & I are flying together. Would it be possible for us to sit together?” “Certainly, sir.”

Then the flight was delayed 4 hours. I sat down, cracked my laptop, & started programming.

Four hours later we boarded the plane. I sat down in the middle seat next to this wizened guy with disturbingly bright eyes. He looked non-plussed as I explained what I’d pulled to get there. We soon got to talking programming, though, & conversation flowed. Turns out that when he found out about the delay, he went home & programmed. Soon we were just a couple of geeks, sitting there talking geeking.

He was one of those guys flying remote control helicopters. Except that he programmed the helicopter & the controller himself, in Oberon. That’s what he’d been doing at home—working on the flight control software.

Extreme Programming was just starting to crackle & pop, so I’m sure I was a bit over-enthusiastic. After I had given an impassioned explanation of incremental design & refactoring, he paused, looked at me with those eyes, and, “I suppose that’s all very well if you don’t know how to design software.” Mic. Drop.

The other moment I remember was that as were approaching Nice he said, “Do you speak any French? Speak French to them. They love that.”

Lessons

Four lessons I learned from Professor Wirth:

• First principles. He was working from a clear set of principles in all his language & programming environment work. He knew what he preferred but he wasn’t satisfied until he knew why.

• Focus. If he knew you weren’t wasting his time he was generous. If not…

• Personal computing. The computer was a device to expand the human mind. His take on this (check out Oberon & descendants) was different than Forth or Smalltalk, but all shared the vision of human as crafter & computer as tool (a perspective we would do well to come back to).

• Geek for life. Professor Wirth was 70 when he was writing embedded software & he was thinking about it so intensely that he fit it even into the cracks of his life. I still have a ways to go to 70 (well, not that far), but I intend to keep geeking.