An interview with Niklaus Wirth (2018) [video]

Niklaus Wirth is best known as the creator of Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon. He received the ACM Turing Award in 1984.

A recurring theme in his career is the emphasis on simplicity and clarity in programming.

Below are a few quotes taken from the interview.

All language designers are influenced by other languages and ideas and hardware:

"...a language designer picks ideas from others, facilities, features, and has the task of putting them into a coherent whole, into a framework. And that is less easy than people might think, because you want to have as much power in the language as possible, yet a compact structure and compact syntax. And that you can get I think only through experience with language design."

Was the Oberon language and system created mostly for teaching purposes? Or was it intended for a wider audience?

"Well, by that time, my ambitions had become more modest. There was obviously no way to play an influence next to Java and C# and C++...But yes, I thought, as I did in the Pascal times, the foundations have been laid when a person learns his first programming language. That’s the key.

In order to do a good experience, you have to have a clean language with a good structure concentrating on the essential concepts and not being snowed in. That is my primary objection to the commercial languages – they’re simply too huge, and they’re so huge that nobody can understand them in their entirety. And it’s not necessary that they’re so huge. But people don’t want to see that. Particularly industry doesn’t. I think the industry thinks it’s a big asset to have a complex thing that increases their reputation of being sophisticated."

On further development of Oberon:

"The incentive came from colleagues mentioning that they had learned very, very much from my book called Project Oberon, which is one of the very few describe a full system and its development in detail. That’s something in computer science that is wrong. People learn to write before they have learned reading."

What are the unifying themes behind his work?

"Well, the unifying theme...is probably 'Make things as regular and as well-structured and as simple as they can be without losing sight of their purpose.'

Undue complexity is a bad thing. And it’s unnecessary. Except in the modern commercial world, it’s often used to hide inadequacies. If something is not transparent, it’s much harder to copy it."