Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardware design and simulation system. In 1984, he received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award for the development of these languages.
But we also had syntax highlighting in the early 90's, so, using uppercase to denote language elements was already an archaic approach that hurt readability.
I'm kind of a fan of Lola, an easy-to-learn HDL which was inspired by Pascal/Oberon vs. Verilog (inspired by C) and VHDL, inspired by Ada.
I like Wirth's whole software stack: RISC-5 (not to be confused with RISC-V) implemented in Lola, Oberon the language, and Oberon the environment. IIRC Lola can generate Verilog - I think the idea was that students could start with an FPGA board and create their own CPU, compiler, and OS.
I also like his various quips - I think he said something like "I am a professor who is a programmer, and a programmer who is a professor." We need more programmer/professors like that. Definitely an inspiration for systems people everywhere.
Also collaborated with Apple on Object Pascal initial design, his students on Component Pascal, Active Oberon, Zonnon, and many other research projects derived from Oberon.
For those who don't know, Pascal was what a lot of the classic Mac software was written in, before Objective-C and Swift. It grew into Delphi, which was a popular low-code option on Windows.
I wouldn’t describe Delphi as low code, it is an IDE. Wikipedia also describes it like this[1] and does not include it in its list of low code development platforms[2].
It was a RAD platform though. From following your links:
> Low-code development platforms trace their roots back to fourth-generation programming language and the rapid application development tools of the 1990s and early 2000s.
> Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal.
It's a shame that Pascal was largely abandoned (except for Delphi, which lived on for a while); I believe several Pascal compilers supported array bounds checking, and strings with a length field. In the 1980s this may have been considered overly costly (and perhaps it is considered so today as well), but the alternative that the computing field and industry picked was C, where unbounded arrays and strings were a common source of buffer overflow errors. Cleaning this up has taken decades and we still probably aren't done.
Better C/C++ compilers and libraries can help, but the original C language and standard library were certainly part of the issue. Java and JavaScript (etc.) may have their issues but at least chasing down pointer errors usually isn't one of them.
A side effect of UNIX adoption, C already being in the box, whereas anything else would cost money, and no famous dialect (Object Pascal, VMS Pascal, Solaris Pascal, UCSD Pascal) being portable.
Unfortunately Pascal only mattered to legions of Mac and PC developers.
My father celebrated 60 two weeks back and told me he bought license for new Delphi and loves it, I was quite surprised with the development he described.
I considered telling him that he could get most of the things (he also buys various components) for free today, but then.. he is about 5 years before retirement and won't relearn all his craft now.
Myself, I am not sure whether its nostalgia but I miss the experience of Delphi 7 I started with 20 years back. In many ways, the simplicity of VLC and the interface is still unbeaten.
> I considered telling him that he could get most of the things (he also buys various components) for free today, but then.. he is about 5 years before retirement and won't relearn all his craft now.
Free Pascal / Lazarus shouldn't be all that much to relearn.
> Myself, I am not sure whether its nostalgia but I miss the experience of Delphi 7 I started with 20 years back.
Delphi 1, 28 years now.
> In many ways, the simplicity of VLC and the interface is still unbeaten.
1) Yup.
2) VCL, btw.
3) Now that Embarcadero is hiking up the price of Delphi with every release, I think the standard-bearer for best librry / framework is probably the LCL, the Lazarus Component Library.
I learned Pascal and MODULA-2 in college, in my first two programming semesters. MODULA-2 was removed shortly afterwards but Pascal is still used in the introductory programming course. I'm very happy to have had these as the languages that introduced me to programming and Wirth occupies a very special place in my heart. His designs were truly ahead of their time.
I had Pascal and some Modula as well (on concurrent programming course).
I learned C++ later myself as a Pascal with bizzare syntax. I always felt like semantics of C++ was taken entirely from Pascal. No two lanuages ever felt closer to each other for me. Like one was just reskin of the other.
I already told this story multiple times, when I came to learn C, I already knew Turbo Pascal since 4.0 up to 6.0, luckly the same teacher that was teaching us about C, also had access to Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS.
I adopted C++ right away as the sensible path beyond Turbo Pascal for cross-platform code, and never seen a use for C primitive and insecure code, beyond being asked to use it in specific university projects, and some jobs during the dotcom wave.
On Usenet C vs C++ flamewars, there might be still some replies from me on the C++ side.
I learned C that way (algorithms class was in C), even had a little printout table of the different syntaxs for the same instructions (here's how you write a for, if, record, declare a variable, etc). At the time I remember thinking that the C syntax was much uglier, and that opinion has stayed with me since -- when I learned Python everything just seemed so natural.
