https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/niklaus-wirth-1934-2024 Software Design: Tidy First? Subscribe Sign in Share this post [https] Niklaus Wirth: 1934-2024 tidyfirst.substack.com Copy link Facebook Email Note Other Personal Niklaus Wirth: 1934-2024 Geek For Life [https] Kent Beck Jan 4, 2024 176 Share this post [https] Niklaus Wirth: 1934-2024 tidyfirst.substack.com Copy link Facebook Email Note Other 6 Share Paperback Pascal User Manual and Report Book 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 Zurich. 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. 176 Share this post [https] Niklaus Wirth: 1934-2024 tidyfirst.substack.com Copy link Facebook Email Note Other 6 Share Previous 6 Comments [https] [ ] Share this discussion [https] Niklaus Wirth: 1934-2024 tidyfirst.substack.com Copy link Facebook Email Note Other Philip Marsey Jan 4Liked by Kent Beck "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" was. classic for me. Discovered it in my first year of university back in [https] 1984, and he influence my thinking more than I realised at the time. Expand full comment Reply Share David Harvey Jan 4Liked by Kent Beck [https] Really fine tribute. Thanks, Kent Expand full comment Reply Share 4 more comments... Top New Community No posts Ready for more? [ ] Subscribe (c) 2024 Kent Beck Privacy [?] Terms [?] Collection notice Start WritingGet the app Substack is the home for great writing This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts