Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth (IPA: ) (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist. He designed a series of programming languages, among them Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon, and he led the construction of the Lilith and Ceres workstations at ETH Zurich. In 1984 he received the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, "for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages".

Wirth studied electrical engineering at ETH Zurich and completed his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. He taught at Stanford University until 1967, and was a professor at ETH Zurich from 1968 until he retired in 1999. At ETH he helped to establish computer science as a separate field of study, and he twice headed its Department of Computer Science. Pascal became a standard language for teaching programming around the world, and his paper "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement" (1971) and his book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (1976) became classic texts.

Throughout his career Wirth argued that software and hardware should be as simple as possible. He built the systems that he taught, often with small teams, and he criticized the size and complexity of commercial software. His essay "A Plea for Lean Software" (1995) popularized the adage now known as Wirth's law.