Programming

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Obit Swiss computer scientist Professor Niklaus Wirth died on New Year's Day, roughly six weeks before what would have been his 90th birthday.

As described in C H Lindsey's History of ALGOL-68 [PDF], when the ALGOL-W proposal was rejected, Wirth resigned from the committee, contributing a strong "Closing Word" to the November 1968 Algol Bulletin 29, containing gems such as:

His own languages were successful, in research and also commercially – Delphi is still on sale, and the Free Pascal project just released Version 3.0 of its cross-platform Lazarus IDE.

You can get a hint of the relationship between the leaders of the rival ALGOL proposals from the way that Van Wijngaarden introduced Wirth on stage at the International Federation for Information Processing congress in 1965.

The Oberon System is a sort of existence proof of how software can be very capable while being almost unbelievably tiny: the inner, outer and systools archives from the 2013 edition total some 4,623 lines of code, in 262kB of text.

In his work, the languages and tools he created, in his eloquent plea for smaller, more efficient software – even in the projects from which he quit – his influence on the computer industry has been almost beyond measure.

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