Swiss computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth has died
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.
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.
+Switzerland should boost computer education and cyber-security, says expert
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.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
External Content
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Almost finished… We need to confirm your email address. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
More
Flat-hunting in Switzerland’s cheapest and most expensive municipalities
More
The Russia affair in the Swiss secret service: ‘This is espionage’
More
Is Switzerland repeating England’s housing mistakes?
More
What a love of cat ladders says about the Swiss
More
Swiss food labels must declare animal suffering from July
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.