New article: obituary of Niklaus Wirth
Bertrand Meyer: Obituary for Niklaus Wirth, in Formal Aspects of Computing, volume 37, issue 2, pages 1-11, published 3 March 2025, available here (publisher’s site).
Shortly after Niklaus Wirth — Turing Award winner for his many seminal contributions including Pascal, Algol W, Modula, virtual machines, Lilith/Ceres, railway diagrams, PL/360, seminal textbooks… — passed away last year, I wrote a long blog article about him. Jim Woodcock, editor of Formal Aspects of Computing, asked me to adapt it for the journal. The result has just been published.
It is not a traditional eulogy; rather, a free-ranging discussion of Wirth’s achievements and my personal analysis of his ideas. Wirth’s career is well-documented elsewhere; my article does not replace encyclopedia entries (or the many talks by Wirth and interviews of him available for example on YouTube), but is more like one side (sadly) of a dialog on programming, languages, methods, tools and the evolution of our common discipline.
Its appearance in Formal Aspects of Computing is apposite: even though Wirth would probably not have characterized himself as a formal methods person, he did work with Tony Hoare on axiomatic language specifications, and all his work shows the same kind of precision and rigor that characterizes formal methods work. I hope my account of his contributions will help make them better known and perpetuate his memory.
Reminder: my full annotated publication list is here.
Eiffel Software
Home page at ETH
Informatics Europe
LASER summer school
Propulsion Academy