On January 1, 2024, Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal, Modula2 and other less widespread programming languages, left us.
He is one of the names that marked global IT evolution in the 80s and 90s. His very famous book “Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs” was the textbook in many university courses around the world, and established the foundations of structured programming.
Pascal, in Borland’s Turbo Pascal version on Ms-Dos PC, was the only “serious” programming language I ever used aside from bash scripting.
I created a small program for generating statistics on the JAM message base of RemoteAccess, the software I used for my FidoNet BBS. It had a certain following among sysops for a while but then fell into disuse and I also lost the sources.
RIP Professor Wirth.
