[HN Gopher] Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
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Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
Author : ingve
Score : 191 points
Date : 2024-01-04 19:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tidyfirst.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tidyfirst.substack.com)
| bsimpson wrote:
| I fell down a Wikipedia hole on the earlier discussion about
| keyboard layouts and learned that the modifier set by modifier
| keys (command, option, control, hyper...) is called the "bucky
| bit," where "Bucky" was Niklaus's college nickname. I wanted to
| share this info with HN, but since TIL post titles aren't welcome
| here, I wasn't sure the right way to point out _why_ it was
| interesting.
|
| So excuse me for piggy-backing on your post:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucky_bit
| rezonant wrote:
| > I wanted to share this info with HN, but since TIL post
| titles aren't welcome here, I wasn't sure the right way to
| point out _why_ it was interesting.
|
| It's not that "Today I Learned" specifically is unwelcome, but
| rather that editorializing titles is frowned upon. I think this
| applies most when there's a perfectly suitable title to use or
| the title itself is subjective instead of objective- I don't
| get the sense that a "Today I Learned" title with a Wikipedia
| link is particularly shunned[1]. As dang will tell you if you
| run afoul of editorializing, "If you want to say what you think
| is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding
| a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level
| playing field with everyone else's."
|
| It would seem entirely normal to see "Bucky Bit" as a title for
| the link, and if you were to post it, a first comment is a
| perfect spot to mention this relationship. In fact, there's an
| opportunity right now!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38888008
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26739124
| ksec wrote:
| I submitted it, I dont see why not as long as you keep the
| title. It just wont get voted to front page.
| tomcam wrote:
| At least professionally, a life beautifully lived.
| kragen wrote:
| "I suppose that's all very well if you don't know how to design
| software."
|
| ouch. it's good to be reminded there are ways to do things beyond
| the ways we know, i suppose
|
| (this was wirth's thought on incremental xp-style design, i
| guess)
| bhaak wrote:
| I totally see him saying that. :-D
|
| First, most software methodologies are for teams. Wirth himself
| was more concerned with the individual programmer.
|
| Second, most software methodologies are for getting at least a
| constant performance out of teams. Improving the performance is
| a concern, too, but most and for all a constant performance
| will enable managers to be able to plan. That's also nothing
| Wirth would thought about.
|
| Wirth would have wanted to get the most out of the individual
| programmer. Be the best programmer you can be to discover the
| best design that is inherent to a problem.
|
| I can also see how that might be at odds with the idea of
| incremental design.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| It's so weird to me that he was already 7 _when Pearl Harbor was
| bombed_.
| devnonymous wrote:
| What do you mean? Why is it weird? Did you mean to imply that
| you're surprised that he was old or that Pearl Harbor happened
| around an average lifetime ago ?
| throwaway66201 wrote:
| Well my _grandfather_ was born years after that event, so it
| is kinda surprising, especially considering his profession.
| layer8 wrote:
| My still-alive father was born before Wirth, and my
| grandparents were born in the 1800s. Generations can span
| quite a range.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, mine too (although my father died a few years
| back).
|
| That being said, I was at a colleagues wedding and his
| grandparents were the same age as my parents, which was
| pretty odd.
| theultdev wrote:
| I have a young family. My great grandmother was alive
| until about my highschool graduation.
|
| People got married and had kids (age 15 for my grandma)
| early back in the day, not too odd.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I meant that WW2 seems so long ago to me, especially
| considering all the social and technological changes that
| have happened since then.
|
| It's interesting to me that a person can see so much change
| over his lifetime.
| theanonymousone wrote:
| I was in a talk of his, where he said "I was a University
| professor at a time when a byte was 6 bits".
| lukego wrote:
| He said that in his youth his colleagues were in awe of him
| because he was brave enough to give presentations in
| _English_. (They were shy and stuck to the local Swiss German
| dialect.)
| begueradj wrote:
| > "I suppose that's all very well if you don't know how to design
| software."
|
| Could anyone who may have more information elaborate on what
| Wirth meant by saying this ? Thank you.
| tinco wrote:
| He's deriding the agile movement. He's saying if you don't know
| how to properly design software (up front), then he supposes
| that doing it in an iterative fashion is an acceptable
| alternative. The way he says it implies that he disapproves of
| it.
|
| In opinions such as this it pays to remind yourself that not
| everyone is faced with the same challenges. For all the esteem
| Wirth garners, I feel (at least at that time) his work on
| compilers and programming language design involves challenges
| that are very different from the challenges that inspired
| Extreme Programming.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| And not everyone has the same abilities. Tayloresquece
| methodologies like Agile are great for getting mediocre
| results for mediocre projects using mediocre developers (if
| they are not mediocre to begin with, certainly they will
| become so) in a repeatable and reportable fashion.
| zvmaz wrote:
| > Tayloresquece methodologies like Agile are great for
| getting mediocre results for mediocre projects using
| mediocre developers (if they are not mediocre to begin
| with, certainly they will become so) in a repeatable and
| reportable fashion
|
| Nuanced, humble, and thoughtful opinion. Thank you.
| rramadass wrote:
| Ha, Ha! I absolutely love your phrasing!
|
| For those who may not know, "Tayloresque" refers to
| techniques pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor)
| who introduced "Scientific Management Techniques" to
| increase worker productivity and efficiency in Factories.
| To the detriment of Humankind, his methods have been taken
| as gospel by the larger "Management Industry" from where
| they have bled into the "Knowledge Management Industry"
| causing all knowledgeable Software Engineers to rue their
| jobs/careers/lives.
| pts_ wrote:
| There's nothing mediocre about delivering features and
| bugfixes at the speed of light on whose correctness your
| reputation is based.
| mjb wrote:
| And that Worth worked primarily on systems that are many
| times smaller (maybe many orders of magnitude smaller) than
| today's biggest systems. It's no surprise, then, that the
| successful techniques are different. The right techniques to
| build a house, a skyscraper, a city, and a garden are
| different.
| extractionmech wrote:
| If you parse it, he is actually saying 2 things:
|
| 1: "very well": methodology can help those without software
| design talent. You should stick to it if you know you can't
| design software.
|
| 2: "don't know": Design can be learned but for the lazy there
| is methodology.
| jhbadger wrote:
| It reminds me of the famous exchange (which may have been
| apocryphal) between Dustin Hoffman and Sir Laurence Olivier.
| Hoffman was describing the "method" in which he got into the
| mind of the character he was going to portray by living as much
| as possible as the character did, wearing the same type of
| clothing, and trying to think like the character. Olivier,
| being a more traditional actor was said to have said "My boy,
| have you tried acting?"
| rramadass wrote:
| "Extreme Programming (XP)"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming) was the
| precursor to and origin of current Agile/Scrum and similar
| methodologies whose main tenet is that "Upfront Design is
| unnecessary" and "Design & Program as you go".
|
| Niklaus Wirth (along with Edsger Djikstra and other greats) had
| established the field of "Structured Design & Programming",
| "Top-Down Design", "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement"
| and similar techniques which laid the foundations of modern
| software development all of which had an emphasis on "Upfront
| Design"; You always Think before you Code.
|
| I am totally with Wirth (and the other greats); XP/Agile/Scrum
| are all lazy excuses used by people "who don't know how to
| design software".
| seanhunter wrote:
| One of my favourity Wirth stories is he came to give a talk at my
| friend's university and they asked him how to pronounce his
| surname, whether you say it "wirt" or "worth" and he said "Well
| you can call me by name _or_ you can call me by value ".
|
| Apparently it was a joke he used often but as a comp sci dad joke
| it totally rules.
| Aldipower wrote:
| > ..., but all shared the vision of human as crafter & computer
| as tool (a perspective we would do well to come back to).
|
| I feel this.
| arkj wrote:
| What makes professor Wirth a unique geek?
|
| To be a geek of geeks in computer science you have to write an OS
| or a Compiler and professor Wirth did both. To top it up he wrote
| the hardware to run it all. Now that's when you call someone a
| king of geeks.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Wow.
|
| I had no literal idea Niklaus Wirth was alive until just now when
| I learned he died. We've lost a giant of the field already in
| 2024. This is definitely black bar worthy.
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