Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth has died

pcgamer.com:

The Association for Computing Machinery has reported that Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist known as the creator of the programming language Pascal, has died at age 89.

Wirth was the designer of numerous programming languages through the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, but it was Pascal, released in 1970, that became his crown jewel. «Following his personal aesthetic, Pascal was simple, flexible and designed for rapid compilation into efficient code,» the ACM website says. «It retained Algol’s code structures, logical completeness, and support for recursion, but stripped away some of its complexity and added support for complex and user-defined data types.

»Pascal’s great leap into mainstream use came a few years later, with the spread of personal computers. The simplicity and efficiency of Pascal made it a natural fit to their limited memory and disk space. Borland’s cheap and fast Turbo Pascal compiler cemented Pascal’s position as the leading high level computer language of the 1980s for serious personal computer software development."

Wirth's contributions to the field of computer science were recognized by the Association for Computer Machinery in 1984 when it awarded him the prestigious AM Turing Award, named after famed mathematician and early computer scientist Alan Turning and sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing. 

Ten years later, he was inducted as an ACM Fellow, recognizing his «outstanding technical, professional, and service contributions» to the field of computer science. 

Wirth is also known for coining Wirth's law in his 1995 essay A Plea for Lean Software, which says that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster—essentially a criticism of software bloat.

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