The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity - Tapa dura

Niklaus Wirth is one of the great pioneers of computer technology and winner of the ACM's A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science. he has made substantial contributions to the development of programming languages, compiler construction, programming methodology, and hardware design. While working at ERH Zurich, he developed the languages Pascal and Modula-2. He also designed an early high performance workstation, the Personal Computer Lilith, and most recently the language and operating system Oberon.
While Wirth has often been praised for his excellent work as a language designer and engineer, he is also an outstanding educator―something for which he is not as well known. This book brings together prominent computer scientists to describe Wirth's contributions to education. With the exception of some of his colleagues such as Professors Dijkstra, Hoare, and Rechenberg, all of the contributors to this book are students of Wirth. The essays provide a wide range of contemporary views on modern programming practice and also illuminate the one persistent and pervasive quality found in all his work: his unequivocal demand for simple solutions. The authors and editors hope to pass on their enthusiasm for simple engineering solutions along with their feeling for a man to whom they are all so indebted.

László Böszörményi is a full professor of computer science at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. His current main research area is distributed systems with emphasis on multi-media infrastructures. László was born in Budapest, Hungary and studied at the Technical University of Budapest. He became acquainted with Niklaus Wirth in 1977, when he spent an academic year at the ETH in Zürich. Since then László has returned as a visitor for longer stays at the ETH. He is the author of a textbook on introductory programming with Modula-3, the high-end successor of Modula-2.

Jurg Gutknecht is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at ETH. He first met Niklaus Wirth in 1981 and joined his research team shortly thereafter. He helped Wirth with the Modula-2 compiler and later went on to develop the Oberon operating system with Wirth from 1986-1989.

Gustav Pomberger is a Professor at the University of Linz, Austria. He studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and received his Ph.D. in Technical Sciences in 1980. From 1992-1999 he was head of the C. Doppler Laboratory for Software Engineering. He has been a friend of Niklaus Wirth for over 15 years.