"Nicklaus Wirth felt that something more suitable to operating systems and application development was needed so he began work on Modula. This became Modula-2 and would be essentially finalized around 1984 or so."
RIP Niklaus #Wirth. Wirth's #Pascal was among the first programming languages I actually enjoyed, after love-hate with #Fortran, #AssemblyLanguage and #PL1. I did loads of programming in Pascal in the 1970s and 1980s, on #DEC10s, #Vaxen and on the first IBM PCs (#TurboPascal). Then, #Modula. If you are using a #Logitech device today (I am!), that's another outcome of Wirth's vast ouvre!
Creator of various programming languages like #modula#modula2#oberon#oberon2#oberon07#pascal and more... the Oberon OS, and interesting computing hardware, such as the Lilith computer, has passed on the 1st of Jan.
He was one of the few people who actually made the full computing stack, from a language and compiler to OS, to hardware to run it on.
I'm hoping that re-imagining computing from the ground up like that, didn't just die with him.
Wirth managed to do what few people in academic CS can/want to do today by implementing his own hardware, OS, compilers, GUI and applications and even designing his own hardware description language in several iterations (#Modula and the #Lilith, #Oberon and the #Ceres and later his RISC5 FPGA systems) and he used the systems in teaching and research at #ETHZ. Today, academic CS often prioritizes teaching of phenomena and coping with commercial HW/SW instead of building from first principles 🙁.