Swiss computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth has died on January 1 at the age of 89, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) confirmed to the Keystone-SDA news agency on Thursday.
Several specialized media previously reported about the death. “With him, Switzerland loses one of its greatest IT pioneers,” said the portal inside-it.ch about the death of the computer scientist from Winterthur.
Wirth was professor of computer science, later renamed computer science, at ETH Zurich from 1968 until his retirement in 1999.
In 1970, Wirth designed the Pascal programming language. It became one of the most popular teaching languages and shaped the development of other programming languages, as ETH Zurich wrote in a portrait in 2021.
In 1984, he was the first and only person from German-speaking countries to receive the Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computer science, for the development of several programming languages.
Wirth also created a law named after him: Wirth’s Law. It is said that hardware that gets faster can never keep up with software that gets slower. (sda)
Source: Watson
I’m Ella Sammie, author specializing in the Technology sector. I have been writing for 24 Instatnt News since 2020, and am passionate about staying up to date with the latest developments in this ever-changing industry.
