The deaths of major entertainment figures and major political figures are ofter noted here, but that leaves out a pretty broad swath of people who had tremendous influence on the world around them. Warnock and Wirth are two of those people. I'm a little late in recognizing their passing, but I'll use "better late than never" as my excuse.

John Warnock is from SLC (Holladay area, very Mo suburb) and graduated from the U of U with a PhD in computer graphics with advisors David Evans and Ivan Sutherland, two of the leading computer graphics experts on the planet back in the 1970s.

The Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) at the U of U is named for John and his wife Marva. He was one of the cofounders of Adobe Systems. He was the principal engineer for Adobe Illustrator, creator and chief evangelist for the Portable Document Format (aka PDF files), and created the PostScript page layout language, still in use for high-end graphics printers. Apple Computer exclusively supported PostScript LaserWriters for (I believe) about 15 years. It was a superb page-layout language, but unfortunately also expensive to implement and expensive to license. so all you folks that bought Apple Laserwriters, you helped finance the U of U engineering building :). John Warnock was one of the driving forces that brought desktop publishing into our lives. He passed away 6 months and a week ago, Aug 19, 2023

Niklaus Wirth passed away Jan 1, 2024. He is much more "inside baseball" than Warnock. For computer science insiders, Wirth changed the world back in the 1970s-80s by developing a programming language named Pascal. He helped create other languages, Oberon and ALGOL-W come to mind, but Pascal was the 800 pound gorilla. It came out at roughly the same time as BASIC, and C. BASIC was a syntactic descendant of FORTRAN, and C was a block-structured language, but it retained a lot of "bit-twiddling" features. Pascal was block structured, and had a very clean, simple design.

Pascal was designed for education. Wirth ended up at UC San Diego, and UCSD Pascal was the language that a whole lot of computer programmers cut their teeth on. It was never intended to be a system programming language, nevertheless, Apple made a slightly extended version of Pascal their system programming language up until Steve Jobs made the NEXT OS the system software for the Macintosh around the year 2000. Pascal and personal computers, particularly Apple computers, grew up together.

Pascal is dated now. It came out just before object-oriented programming took hold.

The other thing that Wirth is famous for is promoting GO TO-less programming. The Go To statement was found in FORTRAN and BASIC. It was used to jump from one location in a program to any other line in a program, contributing to what became derisively known as "spaghetti code", code extremely difficult to debug. The block structure of Pascal and similar languages was the way around spaghetti code.

I imagine only CS students age 60 and above have Pascal burned into their DNA, but for that group, Wirth was fundamental. For those software types who remember the Lilith Project at BYU in the 1970s, the machine language for that computer was a direct hardware implementation of the p-code (pseudo-assembly code) from UCSD Pascal.

Warnock and Wirth didn't write/perform great music, but boy, did they change our lives.

> Warnock and Wirth didn't write/perform great
> music, but boy, did they change our lives.

For the better?*


*Asking for a Luddite friend who doesn't know how to make that squiggly line above an 'n'.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/26/2024 01:10PM by Lot's Wife.

Determining what was the good news and what was the bad news in human progress is an extremely fraught undertaking.

I take no position on whether the changes were for better or worse. They were big changes. That much is true.

I trust you'll tell us when Elon dies.

No, but I will note the passing of Donald Knuth, though there is considerable opinion that he will not die, but be translated and go directly to computer heaven. ;)

Oh, Elon. I read it as "Elton." Oops.

I think Elon is already among the undead.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/26/2024 01:30PM by Brother Of Jerry.

Damn. I was hoping I could one day force you to tell us whether Elon was "better" or "worse."

Discretion, valor. . . Damn.

ñ

and ç (except Spanish never figured out c cedilla. They just slap an unnecessary "i" after a "c" to force it to be a soft "c" - e.g. "gracias" instead of Portuguese "graças." How Luddito is that? )

Dave!

We lost Richard Lewis. RIP.

I never watched all of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but he was a hoot. His neurotic comedy style made me chuckle.