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Niklaus Wirth Quotes (1934-2024)
Scientist
About Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus E. Wirth (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist and winner of the 1984 Turing Award. He is best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering.
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“Go To statement considered harmful.”
“Programming is usually taught by examples.”
“Reliable and transparent programs are usually not in the interest of the designer.”
“In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensable luxury, but a simple necessity.”
“But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs.”
“Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples.”
“... we do not consider it as good engineering practice to consume a resource lavishly just because it happens to be cheap.”
“During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible.”
“In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.”
“Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated.”
“As a matter of fact, the adaptability of a program to changes in its objectives (often called maintainability) and to changes in its environment (nowadays called portability) can be measured primarily in terms of the degree to which it is neatly structured.”
Niklaus Wirth Quotes by Topic
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Niklaus Wirth on Software
Niklaus Wirth on Deliberation
“The possible solutions to a given problem emerge as the leaves of a tree, each node representing a point of deliberation and decision.”
Niklaus Wirth on Notation
“My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.”
What Niklaus Wirth Said About Others
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Niklaus Wirth on Edsger W. Dijkstra 2 quotes
“Of great influence to Pascal was Structured Programming, put forth by E. W. Dijkstra. This method of proceeding in a design would obliviously be greatly encouraged by the use of a Structured Language, a language with a set of constructs that could freely be combined and nested. The textual structure of a program should directly reflect its flow of control.”
Quotes About Niklaus Wirth
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About Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus E. Wirth (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist and winner of the 1984 Turing Award. He is best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering.