School of Niklaus Wirth

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1. justin66Apr 2026
   The latter is lifted from “The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity,” which is a worthwhile volume for anyone with an interest in this stuff.
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2. pjmlpJan 2026
   This is shared with languages from ALGOL linage like Ada, Object Pascal, Modula-2 and others.

   Hence why from C culture point of view they used to be referred to as programming with straightjacket.

   An insight into this be read on books like "The School of Niklaus Wirth" or "Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK".

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3. sitkackMar 2023
   Not being snarky, but Lisp and Forth should have interactive experiences that the other languages do not have. The Pascal related languages are renowned for being designed to be compiled at high speed.

   This is a wonderful book, "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity"

   https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2022/07/04/the-school-of-n...

   Esp this chapter on the Wirthian way of designing compilers https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221350529_Compiler_...

   See also the widely read (on hn), https://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

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4. cpetersoMay 2019
   Niklaus Wirth fans will appreciate the (apparently out of print) book "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity", written by some of Wirth's students about his and their research work with languages, operating systems, and the Lilith computer.

   https://amzn.com/1558607234

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5. kev009Oct 2018
   Niklaus Wirth is one of the luminary people in computing. Definitely take a look at his books, they are extremely concise and to the point. Also interesting (but less so than Wirth's actual writing) is the book "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity".

   Interestingly he was the Martin Oderskey's (Scala etc) PhD advisor.

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6. sitkackMar 2018
   "The School of Niklaus Wirth" [0] contains this essay and many others on how simplicity can be an essential quality of a system. I vastly under appreciated how well Wirthian languages are designed, even after toying with the excellent offshoot, Modula3 [1]. In my youth I was too concerned with raw performance and syntax. In my old age I am concerned about semantics and maintainability.

   [0] https://www.amazon.com/School-Niklaus-Wirth-Art-Simplicity/d...

   [1] https://github.com/modula3/cm3

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