Niklaus Wirth’s “Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass” (via: MetaFilter)
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/01/02
I forgot who pointed me at this, but recently I came across a reference to the Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass paper by Niklaus Wirth (by many known as the “father” of Pascal, though he has done a lot more – for instance the WSN – , still is involved with the ETH in Zürich, and turns 80 on February 15h).
Back when it appeared in the 2005/2006 timeframe I missed it, and I’m glad to have bumped into just for the historic perspective he offers. I can understand some will disagree with parts of his conclusions and observations, that’s why I like that MetaFilter has a nice page with discussion about it and a link to the PDF version of the paper.
I also like that Niklaus kept active in the field of computer science for so long, similar to Donald Knuth. There is a lot to having a great historic perspective to things.
–jeroen
via: Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass | MetaFilter.
David Moorhouse said
Wirth’s comments on writing the original Pascal compiler
“Thereafter, new versions, handling more and more of Pascal’s constructs, and producing more and more refined code, could be obtained by bootstrapping. Immediately after the first bootstrap, we discarded the translation written in the auxiliary language. Its character had been much alike that of the ominous low-level language C, published a year later. After this experience, it was hard to understand that the software engineering community did not recognize the benefits of adopting a high-level, type-safe language instead of C”
Peter MM said
My favorit: clever software for dummies: a bad idea!
jpluimers said
(: