Niklaus Wirth

Wirth designed Pascal (1970), Modula-2 (late 1970s), and Oberon (late 1980s) at ETH Zurich. Pascal became one of the most widely used teaching languages of the 1970s and 1980s and was the primary development language for the Apple Lisa and early Macintosh, while Modula-2 introduced module systems for separate compilation.

Wirth received the 1984 Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages, most notably Pascal, which emphasized clarity, structured programming, and strong static type checking. His designs demonstrated that languages could prioritize programmer productivity and correctness without sacrificing efficiency.

Wirth advocated that languages should be minimal and orthogonal, rejecting the trend of adding ever more features. His 1995 article 'A Plea for Lean Software' articulated this philosophy, arguing that bloated, feature-laden software had become a serious problem for reliability and maintainability.

Wirth designed the Lilith workstation in the early 1980s, a personal computer built to run Modula-2 efficiently that was among the first European-designed workstations with a bit-mapped display and mouse. He later designed the Oberon System, which integrated the operating system, compiler, and text editor into a remarkably compact codebase running on custom Ceres hardware.