Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication,
which is baffling-the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather
than admiration. - Niklaus Wirth

With sadness we note the passing of Niklaus Emil Wirth, Swiss computer
scientist and 2004 CHM Fellow, who died at the age of 89 on January 1,
2024.

Niklaus Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1934. He received
the degree of electronics engineer from the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH-Zurich) in 1959, an MSc from Laval University (1960),
and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC
Berkeley (1963).

Upon graduation from Berkeley, Wirth became an assistant professor at
the newly created computer science department of Stanford University.
From 1968 until his retirement in 1999, he was a professor at ETH in
Zurich. There, he developed the programming languages Pascal (1970),
Modula-2 (1979), and Oberon (1988). Pascal, in particular, became a
widely used programming language in computer science education and
influenced a generation of students and professional programmers.

Following two separate sabbatical leaves at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC) in California, Wirth became an enthusiastic
adopter of the groundbreaking workstations he saw there, and returned
home inspired to build similar systems. While doing so, he
simultaneously created several elegant and useful programming languages
and environments that had profound research implications.

Wirth contributed to both hardware and software aspects of computer
design and wrote influential books on software engineering and
structured programming. Among other recognitions, he holds the ACM
Turing Award (1984).

https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-niklaus-wirth-1934-2024/
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Internetado.