The Association for Computing Machinery reported that Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist best known as the creator of the programming language Pascal, has died at age 89.

Wirth was the designer of numerous programming languages throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, but Pascal, released in 1970, became his crowning jewel. According to his personal aesthetic, Pascal was designed to compile quickly into simple, flexible, and efficient code. Algol's code structure, logical completeness, and support for recursion were retained, while complexity was removed and support for complex user-defined data types was added."

"It was only a few years later, with the proliferation of personal computers, that Pascal broke into the mainstream; its simplicity and efficiency made it a natural fit for limited memory and disk space. Borland's inexpensive and fast Turbo Pascal compiler solidified Pascal's position as the leading high-end computer language of the 1980s for serious personal computer software development. [The award, named after the famous mathematician and early computer scientist Alan Turning, is also known as the Nobel Prize of the computer world. [Ten years later, he was elected an ACM Fellow, recognizing his "outstanding technical, professional, and service contributions" in the field of computer science. [He is also known for his 1995 essay, "A Plea for Lean Software," in which he proposed "Wirth's law."

"The operating system had to be managed in 8,000 bytes, and the compiler had to fit in 32K bytes. Could such bloated software have been any faster, for without hardware that was 1,000 times faster, modern software would be utterly useless."

"Increased user convenience and functionality are supposed to justify larger software sizes, but a closer look reveals that these justifications are shaky. Text editors still perform the reasonably simple tasks of inserting, deleting, and moving portions of text; compilers still translate text into executable code; and operating systems still manage memory, disk space, and processor cycles. These basic obligations have not been changed by the advent of windows, cut-and-paste strategies, and pop-up menus, nor by the replacement of meaningful command words with pretty icons.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm getting the feeling that Wirth was my kind of guy.

Upon hearing of his passing, a number of people who are programmers took to Twitter to pay tribute to Wirth. They included Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, and George Broussard, co-founder of Apogee Software, who took to Twitter to share his He shared his memories of Wirth and Pascal on Twitter. "Wirth was the creator of Pascal and was part of the Algol group that defined the foundation of modern programming languages in 1957." Power through simplicity, simplicity through generality" was the name of the game. He made programming better for everyone.