Random ramblings of a security nerd

RIP Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth, known for his work on programming languages and systems, died on January 1st, 2024 (ETH Zurich). Wirth was known for his work on programming languages and systems with a keen focus on simplicity and functionality for which he was awarded the 1984 Turing Award. His most well-known language is Pascal, a procedural language that rose to fame in the 80ies thanks to Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler. Pascal allowed an easy intro into systems programming. Apart from its simplicity (it can be learned in a few hours), it allows the user to define their own data types, giving them flexibility. Compared to C, the other dominant systems language, Pascal came with guard-rails-by-default. While C is predominately known for its bugs, Pascal is known for its efficiency. Wirth carefully designed his programming languages and made sure that, while they were always effective, there never was fluff. He was a keen advocate of the KISS principle and lived it throughout his career. All his languages (and architectures) are designed around that principle: enabling powerful features while remaining easy to learn and protecting the user from making mistakes.

When I started my computer science studies at ETH Zurich in 2001, he was already retired but ever present in the ETH INF cafeteria and I remember discussing undergraduate studies with him. Apart from BASIC and assembly, Pascal was the first real programming language I learned in early high school and its design principles guided my future career. I loved hacking code and believe that Pascal was instrumental in guiding me into computer science as a field and then systems and security as my research area. During my PhD, we had several discussions regarding systems and efficiency. I clearly remember one discussion we had about the complexities of runtime systems with a particular focus on the libc. While the interactions got less frequent as he "retired" and only sporadically visited ETH, his legacy will remain influential as for security, simplicity is always better than bloat!

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