Swiss computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth passed away on on January 1, at the age of 89, as the federal technology institute ETH Zurich, confirmed to the Keystone-SDA news agency on Thursday.
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Fallece el pionero informático suizo Niklaus Wirth
Several specialised media had previously reported on the death. “With his death, Switzerland has lost one of its greatest IT pioneers”, commented the inside-it.ch portal on the death of the computer scientist from Winterthur.
From 1968 until his retirement in 1999, Wirth was Professor of Computer Science, which was later renamed Informatics, at ETH Zurich.
Wirth developed the Pascal programming language in 1970. 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 so far only person from a German-speaking country to receive the Turing Award, one of the highest honours in computer science, for the development of several programming languages.
Wirth also created a law named after him: Wirth’s Law. It states that hardware that gets faster never keeps up with software that gets slower.
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