I forgot who pointed me at this, but recently I came across a reference to the Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass paper by Niklaus Wirth (by many known as the “father” of Pascal, though he has done a lot more - for instance the WSN - , still is involved with the ETH in Zürich, and turns 80 on February 15h).
Back when it appeared in the 2005/2006 timeframe I missed it, and I’m glad to have bumped into just for the historic perspective he offers. I can understand some will disagree with parts of his conclusions and observations, that’s why I like that MetaFilter has a nice page with discussion about it and a link to the PDF version of the paper.
I also like that Niklaus kept active in the field of computer science for so long, similar to Donald Knuth. There is a lot to having a great historic perspective to things.
–jeroen
via: Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass | MetaFilter.
Filed under: Delphi, Development, History, Pascal, Software Development
