Niklaus Emil Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, on 15 February 1934.
He earned a Bachelor of … See more

From 1963 to 1967, Wirth served as assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zürich. Then in 1968, he became a professor of informatics at ETH Zürich, takin… See more

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He … See more

In 1995, he popularized the adage now named Wirth's law. In his 1995 paper "A Plea for Lean Software" he attributed the following to Martin Reiser phrasing it as, "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardwa… See more

The April 1971 Communications of the ACM article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement", concerning the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering. The paper is considered t… See more