In 1999, a rising software engineer in Switzerland was preparing for a conference in France when he learned that Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, a pioneer in the field, was also attending and would be on the same flight.
The engineer, Kent Beck, never met Wirth. But, he recalled in an interview, upon arriving at the airport he told the gate agent: “My colleague Professor Wirth and I are flying together. Would it be possible for us to sit together?”
Beck, who would eventually become a well-known programmer himself, said that sitting next to Wirth and talking was comparable to a young singer getting the chance to perform with Taylor Swift. Among other feats in computer history, Wirth created Pascal, an influential programming language in the early days of personal computing.
“It was unusual for me to be so bold,” Beck said of his duplicity, “but I would regret it for the rest of my life.”
The agent assigned him a middle seat next to his supposed colleague, who had a window. Sitting down, Beck immediately admitted the fraud. Wirth was mildly amused. “Once a geek knows you’re interested in what they’re geeking about,” Beck said, “the conversation is over.”
Wirth died of heart failure on Jan. 1 at his home in Zurich, said his daughter, Tina Wirth. He was 89 years old.
He was not nearly as famous as developers like Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. But for Beck and legions of computer scientists, Wirth was one of the most influential and successful scientists of the early computer age.
In 1970, while teaching at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, Wirth published Pascal, the programming language that powered early Apple computers and early versions of applications such as Skype and Adobe Photoshop. He also built one of the first personal computers and was instrumental in helping a Swiss startup commercialize a mouse. (The startup, Logitech, has become one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer accessories.)
In 1984, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Wirth the Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize in computing. Other recipients included Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Vinton Cerf, who wrote the code that powers communications on the Internet.
For Wirth, simplicity was paramount in computing, and he created Pascal—named after Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician and inventor of the calculator—as a simpler alternative to languages such as BASIC, which he found too cumbersome.
BASIC forced programmers to “jump around, writing spaghetti code,” Philippe Kahn, a former Wirth student who later founded several technology companies, told New York Times reporter Steve Lohr in an interview for his book “Go To” (2001). ), software history.
“Pascal forced people to think about things clearly and in terms of data structures,” Kahn said. He added: “Wirth’s influence is extremely profound because so many people taught in real computer science programs learned Pascal. It was the language of classical thinking in computing.”
Wirth evangelized simplicity in a seminal essay for Computer magazine in 1995. “People seem to be increasingly mistaking complexity for sophistication,” he wrote, “which is puzzling—the incomprehensible should arouse suspicion, not admiration.”
Niklaus Emil Wirth was born on February 15, 1934, in Winterthur, Switzerland, the only child of Walter Wirth, a professor of geography, and Hedwick (Keller) Wirth, who managed the family home.
He was a precocious child.
“In elementary school, I first wanted to become a steam engine driver, later a pilot,” he recalled in a 2014 interview. “I never aspired to become a scientist, but an engineer who understands nature and does something useful with that knowledge.”
He installed a chemical laboratory in the family basement. He fiddled with the radios. And he built (and crashed) remote control helicopters. Fixing them taught him an early lesson in simplicity.
“If you have to pay out of pocket,” he told BusinessWeek in 1990, “learn not to complicate repairs.”
Wirth studied electrical engineering at ETH Zurich, the University of Science and Technology. After graduating in 1959, he received a master’s degree from Laval University in Quebec and a doctorate in programming languages from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1963 to 1967, he taught at the newly formed computer science department at Stanford, and then returned to Switzerland.
At the request of ETH officials, Wirth started a computer science department. When he tried to decide which programming language to teach, he found the options too complex. He started working on Pascal, and in 1971 he used it to teach an introductory programming course.
Wirth was not trying to cash in on Pascal. In fact, he sent the source code on nine-track tapes to anyone who wanted one. This act of collegial generosity coincided with the microprocessor revolution, so that professors, would-be programmers, and new computer companies had a free, easy-to-use language to use.
“Pascal,” Wirth liked to say, “was a public good.”
In 1976, Wirth took a sabbatical to work at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, which created the Alto, one of the first desktop computers with a mouse-driven graphical interface.
“I got an Alto computer all to myself, on my desk, and it was an absolute game changer in the way computers were used,” Wirth recalled in Computer magazine in 2012.
Wirth coveted the Alto, but they weren’t for sale. So when he returned to Switzerland, he built a similar computer for himself, with his own new programming language.
His first marriage, to Nani Jucker in 1959, ended in divorce. In 1984, he married Diana (Pschorr) Blessing. She died in 2009.
In addition to his daughter Tina, from his first marriage, Wirth is survived by two other children from that marriage, Chris Wirth and Carolyn Wiskemann; six grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and his partner since 2017, Rosmarie Müller.
Accepting the Turing Award, Wirth spoke in awe of how he first experienced the power of personal computing at Xerox.
“Instead of sharing a large monolithic computer with many others and fighting for share over a wire with a 3 kHz bandwidth, I was now using my own computer mounted under the desk over a 15 MHz channel,” he said. “The effect of a five-thousand-fold increase in anything is not predictable; it’s overwhelming.”
Instead of him working at the computer, now the computer worked for him.
“For the first time,” he said, “I did my daily correspondence and report writing with the help of a computer, instead of planning new languages, translators, and programs that others might use.”