{"id":1184,"date":"2024-12-11T15:25:03","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T15:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/?p=1184"},"modified":"2024-12-11T15:25:03","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T15:25:03","slug":"in-honour-of-niklaus-wirth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/2024\/12\/11\/in-honour-of-niklaus-wirth\/","title":{"rendered":"In Honour of Niklaus Wirth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Niklaus Wirth<\/strong> died in Z\u00fcrich on 1st January 2024. He was one of the great pioneers of programming language design, and specifically design of languages for education.<\/p>\n

His languages were a huge influence on me, and on my thinking. Pascal was one of the first languages I learned, and Modula-2 and Oberon also opened worlds to me when I understood what lay behind their design.<\/p>\n

The Informatics in Education<\/a><\/strong> journal has just published a special edition<\/a><\/strong> to honour Wirth’s tremendous contribution to our community. I contributed an article to this edition, titled Principles of Educational Programming Language Design<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I invite you to read it; it might be of interest to you if you are interested in programming language history, in the design of programming languages or in programming education.<\/p>\n

The entire special edition is worth a look. It contains many other interesting contributions.<\/p>\n

\n

In 2002, I had the honour to introduce Wirth’s keynote address at the ITiCSE conference in Aarhus, and to have dinner with him. One of my treasured memories.<\/p>\n

\"Image

Niklaus Wirth and I (in much younger years), at the conference dinner at ITiCSE 2002, in Aarhus<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Sitting

At the ITiCSE 2002 conference dinner (left to right): Michael K\u00f6lling, Niklaus Wirth, Michael E Caspersen, David Gries<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Niklaus Wirth died in Z\u00fcrich on 1st January 2024. He was one of the great pioneers of programming language design, and specifically design of languages for education. His languages were a huge influence on me, and on my thinking. Pascal … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[141],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming-language-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/179"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1184"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1193,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions\/1193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/proged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}