Another muse was a software visionary in Switzerland, Niklaus Wirth, whose elegantly simple coding language, Pascal, helped spark the personal computer revolution at Apple in the 1980s and elsewhere and radically simplified the way programmers produced their instructions.
“This was the first generation that was free to focus on what you could do with the computer rather than the computer itself,” said Dr. Wirth, who died at his home in Zurich on January 1 at the age of 89.
Dr. Wirth’s Pascal, named after the 17th-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal, brought simplified language and intuitive logic to the digital realm in the early 1970s. Earlier computer coding capabilities, including FORTRAN, BASIC, and others, worked well with simple processes, but often required complicated steps to perform more demanding functions.
dr. Wirth liked to repeat an analogy coined by British computer scientist Tony Hoare, who described pre-Pascal languages as akin to playing the piano with two fingers. Easy songs can be learned quickly, but harder songs become extremely difficult.
Pascal’s spread was fueled in part by Dr. Wirth’s open source initiatives. He didn’t try to profit from his creation, saying it should be a “public good.” He shared the source code with anyone who asked. At the same time, computers increasingly became a part of everyday use in the academic and business community. Access to Pascal gave a generation of young programmers a common set of tools for experimenting and building code.
“A generation came along that had easy access to computers and, most importantly, that didn’t have to break old habits,” he said in a 2004 interview for an academic journal published by the University of Klagenfurt in Austria.
Pascal variations have taken root throughout the industry, including Microsoft Windows. A former software company, Borland, developed fast-running versions Pascal, including the popular Turbo Pascal. dr. Wirth “changed the way people think about programming,” Borland co-founder Philippe Kahn told BusinessWeek.
In 1984, Dr. Wirth received the Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize in Computing, from the Association for Computing Machinery. In his speech at the awards ceremony in San Francisco, Dr. Wirth described the process of invention as separating “what is essential from what is transient” and, through trial and error, discarding anything overly complicated or unnecessary.
“You learn best,” he said, “by making things up.”
Niklaus Emil Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland on February 15, 1934. His father was a professor of geography and his mother was a housewife.
He said that as a boy he was very interested in mechanics and experimentation. He worked in a home chemistry lab in the basement, took apart radios and built model airplanes that he sent into the air in the fields around his house. Misfortunes, he said, taught him lessons about the value of thrift and precision.
“If you have to pay [for repairs] out of your own pocket,” he told BusinessWeek in 1990, “you learn not to complicate repairs.”
He graduated in electrical engineering in 1959. at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, known as ETH Zurich. He left Europe for further studies: a master’s degree in 1960 at Laval University in Quebec City and a doctorate in programming languages at the University of California, Berkeley, three years later.
From 1963 to 1967, he worked at the newly founded Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He and colleagues developed computer languages, including a version of the algorithmic language called Algol-W that was adopted by some universities to teach programming on the IBM System/360 mainframe Computer.
dr. Wirth returned to Switzerland to start a similar computer science program at ETH Zurich. He extended Algol-W to create the first iteration of Pascal, which was intended to teach programming students. The first Pascal code was in operation in 1970 on university computers.
Gradually, Dr. Wirth introduced the concept of “structured programming,” which includes the ability to reuse common code for simplicity and to reduce potential errors. The concept, considered innovative in the early 1970s, has become the standard for teaching programming.
“The art of engineering is not so much making something very complicated,” Dr. Wirth said in a 1985 interview. “Art is to make a complicated problem simpler.”
In 1976, Dr. Wirth took a sabbatical to work at the Xerox Palo Alto research center, which inspired Apple’s first designers. He described the experience of having his own desktop computer as “overwhelming” and as the motivation for deciding to share Pascal on an open platform.
At ETH Zurich, he later developed a high-performance workstation he called Lilith and helped a Swiss start-up, Logitech, bring the mouse to market. Logitech has become one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer equipment. dr. Wirth was appointed to head ETH’s Institute for Computer Systems in 1990 and retired in 1999.
His marriage to Nani Jucker ended in divorce. He was married to Diana Blessing from 1984 until her death in 2009. Survivors include his partner, Rosmarie Müller; three children from the first marriage; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. The family announced the death, but did not specify the cause.
dr. Wirth is often credited as the father of an oft-repeated adage in computing: the speed of software is slowing relative to the pace of increasing speed in hardware such as microprocessors.
“When you’re developing a program, it’s much harder to come up with a simple solution than a complicated one,” he said. “Unfortunately, our computers are terribly uncritical. They swallow anything.”