Besides his contribution to language design, he authored one of the best puns ever. His last name is properly pronounced something like "Virt" but in the US everyone calls him by "Worth".
That led him to quip, "In Europe I'm called by name, but in the US I'm called by value."
The joke goes back to Adriaan van Wijngaarden introducing Wirth at a conference in the 1960s. I'd love to see a video of the audience reaction to that one.
Today I learned (from the Wikiquote page), what an obviously socially witty person he seems to have been!
> Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.
It is refreshing to see the old-fashioned trope of the genius computer scientist / software enginieer as a "foreigner to the world" being contested again and again by stories like this.
Of course people like Niklaus Wirth are exceptional in many ways, so it might be that the trope has/had some grain of truth, that just does not co-correlate with the success of said person :)
And of course people might want to argue about the differences betweem SE, CS and economics.
After all that rambling... RIP and thank you Niklaus!
The joke really only works if you use his first name! The complete joke is that "by value" means pronouncing first and last name to sound like "Nickles Worth".
It reminds me of my only meeting with Andy Tanenbaum / AAT [0], one of the smartest, nicest computer science guy I've ever met in my life. I can't recall the many puns and jokes he shared, but it was just incredible.
The linked tweet says "Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way ('Ni-klows Wirt'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nick-les Worth'. This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value."
Okay, either me or the ref. may have been wrong. but I distinctly remember "Veert", because it was non-intuitive to me (as the way to pronounce Wirth), as a guy who didn't know any German at the time, only English. So the ref., probably.
It's not really wrong. There are English accents (such as Received Pronunciation) where an "ee" before an "r" is normally pronounced with an [ɪ] like in "wit". In any case, even if you pronounce the "ee" as something else like [i], "Veert" is probably still the sequence of letters that maximises the likelihood that an English speaker will understand by it something close to the true German pronunciation ([vɪʁt] or [vɪɐt]). "Virt", for example, would be read by most people as [vɜrt] (rhyming with "hurt") which to my ear is further off from the correct pronunciation compared to something like [viət].
"Veert" is correct, in the sense that it's how a German would pronounce it. Of course, the great man wasn't German; I don't know how he pronounced his own surname.
"Wit" is just wrong. Perhaps that was a joke that I missed about the man's humour.
He was Swiss, more exactly from the city of Winterthur located in the canton (state) of Zürich. The canton's official language is German, however. Of course, people over there speak in a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch".
You just elongate the vowel i.e. pronounce it longer. The double „ü“ just indicates this vowel to be stressed. Dialects do not follow a strict orthography, however, so you might find it written slightly differently in other contexts.
Wirth lived in the United States for some time throughout his life but is a Zürich native. He must have spoken Züritüütsch („Zurich German“) privately, I am pretty sure (without having known him personally).
Umlauts aren't diphtongs; it's the same sound all the way through. GP used two consecutive ones in order to show that the sound is long. (And whaddoino, if the dialect has an official orthography, maybe that's how it's supposed to be spelled.)
We have both, and I'd tend to pronounce "Wirth" similar to "wit" as far as the "i" goes. It's not always clear just from looking at the letter. But some words have explicit cues: There are "stretching consonants" like a-a, a-h, e-e, e-h, i-e, i-h, etc: Aal, Kahn, dehnen, dienen, sühnen, etc. And sometimes the following consonant gets doubled up to indicate a shorter pronunciation, like in "Bitte".
The "i" sound in "wit" does exist in German and is what is normally indicated by "i" on its own. The long "ee" sound is normally spelt as "ie" in German.
And what's the difference? AFAICT it's pretty much exactly the same sound, except in one case it's longer, in the other shorter. Say "bit"... Then say it again, only looonger... And you get "beet". Say "wit", but longer, and you get "wheat".
That led him to quip, "In Europe I'm called by name, but in the US I'm called by value."