Interview with Niklaus Wirth

[SiliconWizard]

A piece of history and some wise words:
(this is in German, but you can enable subtitles in English.)

[brucehoult]

Nice!  A lot of personal and career information I wasn't aware of there.

I'm surprised there was no mention of Apple's Object Pascal which was designed in 1985 by Wirth and Larry Tesler.

[SiliconWizard]

I'm surprised there was no mention of Apple's Object Pascal which was designed in 1985 by Wirth and Larry Tesler.

This is just a one-hour interview so obviously some things were missing. Whether intentional or not, who knows. I'm not completely sure about how he felt about Apple, generally speaking.

But he said on several occasions (in other talks as well) that he was always surprised by how much traction Pascal had gotten at the time.
And Object Pascal is still being actively used.

One fun fact that I hadn't heard before was about the curly brackets vs begin/end. Interesting to hear about the rationale when people are still arguing about using one or the other for new languages.

[brucehoult]

One fun fact that I hadn't heard before was about the curly brackets vs begin/end. Interesting to hear about the rationale when people are still arguing about using one or the other for new languages.

Yes, that ("the braces on our printer were too thin") was a very strange reason. The Python people have braces so thin that they don't exist at all.

My preference is for them to be thin enough to be unobtrusive, but turn out to exist if I go looking for them.

[SiliconWizard]

One fun fact that I hadn't heard before was about the curly brackets vs begin/end. Interesting to hear about the rationale when people are still arguing about using one or the other for new languages.

Yes, that ("the braces on our printer were too thin") was a very strange reason. The Python people have braces so thin that they don't exist at all.

It does make some sense to me. You want your syntax to be easy to read, and being able to see block delimiters clearly is important. At the time, printing code was very common.
And one-liner statements were also very common due to limited screen estate, making block delimiters perfectly readable important.
Stuff like: "IF xxx THEN BEGIN yyy; zzz; aaa END;" was common. Replace BEGIN and END with curly braces that you can't see clearly, and the whole thing breaks down.

It will of course sound weird to Python afficionados.
Likewise, all uppercase keywords were just to make things easier to read in times when syntax highlighting  was just non-existing. These days it's not a problem whatsoever, although I'm sometimes surprised to see how many people are still unconvinced of the readability that syntax highlighting provides. My personal preference is not abusing flashy colors and showing keywords in bold.

[rstofer]

Likewise, all uppercase keywords were just to make things easier to read in times when syntax highlighting  was just non-existing. These days it's not a problem whatsoever, although I'm sometimes surprised to see how many people are still unconvinced of the readability that syntax highlighting provides. My personal preference is not abusing flashy colors and showing keywords in bold.

It's all fun and games until somebody decides to display error messages in red on a black background (I'm talking about you Arduino IDE).  These messages are virtually invisible to those with defective color vision and that includes a sizeable percent of the population.  Somewhere around 8% of adult males and around 1/2% of adult females.

Cyan on black has always worked and BEGIN END removes all doubt.  Bold if you must...

https://accessibility.psu.edu/color/colorvisiondetails

[DiTBho]

It's all fun and games until somebody decides to display error messages in red on a black background

pufff, worse still yellow on white 
(I updated an OS, I got /etc/colors mess)

[SiliconWizard]

Well syntax hilighting is best done with just bold (and I like italic for comments) and very few different colors with good contrast and preferably with not too saturated colors. Also I do hate black backgrounds and while I know it's down to personal preference, based on my experience (sure personal) but also on a few papers, I think people should just stop using those "dark modes". They don't look good (but I admit that kinda personal taste so many will probably disagree judging by how popular they have become) but most of all, they hurt your vision contrary to what many think. Dark on light backgrounds is much more legible than light on dark backgrounds and is much easier on our vision. I can find back ophthalmology papers on the topic to back this up for the incredulous. And to avoid the bright white backgrounds which may be a bit too much, I usually set a very pale yellow instead. Works great. This isn't meant at all to be a flame ware although I'm convinced it has the potential of becoming one, but IMHO dark modes are good for kids nerding in their basement, not for adults.

[brucehoult]

Agree on all of that. I generally use X11 "Wheat" (F5DEB3) for emacs and maybe "White Smoke" (F5F5F5) for terminals.

My monitors are set to maximum contrast, and 0% brightness in a fairly dim room, or maybe 15% in a bright office.

People who think they prefer "dark mode" probably have their monitors set to be like a blazing sun. Ideally, the intensity of "white" should be like a sheet of paper, not like an arc lamp.

I used any number of green-on-black and amber-on-black terminals in the distant past, and even on white VT100s I preferred white-on-black because the intensity of the screen was so high and the quality so low when I tried to use black-on-white.

On CRT you needed a high refresh rate to make black-on-white work. (Irrelevant on LCD)

I switched as soon as the PERQ and Lisa/Mac came out, with good quality high refresh rate black-on-white displays and I've never looked back.

For me, the huge advantage the Mac had in the 1980s and early 90s over not only the Amiga and Atari ST but also over DOS/Windows was nothing at all to do with the CPU speed or price or even the software, but in the massively better quality of the video displays, which made them much much less fatiguing to use.

[Nominal Animal]

Colors and fonts are things I demand be under user control, because my own preferences vary depending on the task and physical situation.

[cfbsoftware]

I'm surprised there was no mention of Apple's Object Pascal which was designed in 1985 by Wirth and Larry Tesler.

AFAIK it was designed by a team led by Larry Tesler with minimal input from Wirth.

Wirth had been working on Pascal's successor, Modula-2, for several years by then and had just started to address the problem of object-oriented design with his later language Oberon after visiting the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

[cfbsoftware]

Additionally, in December 2021 ETH recorded a series of YouTube interviews with Niklaus
Wirth. Links are listed on the  D-INFK news channel: (search for 'Wirth')

https://inf.ethz.ch/news-and-events/spotlights/infk-news-channel.html

 "I always saw myself as an engineer" - Part 1/3

 "Switzerland had slept through it" - Part 2/3

"You can't invent everything perfectly from the start" - Part 3/3

You can configure YouTube to display subtitles in English if necessary.

[SiliconWizard]

People who think they prefer "dark mode" probably have their monitors set to be like a blazing sun. Ideally, the intensity of "white" should be like a sheet of paper, not like an arc lamp.

Yes, well, for a good number of them, I think this is also largely because it's trendy. But yep as I said, you don't want blinding white either. Pale yellow/beige works great for backgrounds.
(And you can turn down the brightness of your display too depending on ambiant lighting.)
This is more or less what you get with "solarized light" themes, for instance.

I think the first time I ran into programming editors with this color scheme, and keywords in bold, this was in a Borland product.

[mfro]

...
For me, the huge advantage the Mac had in the 1980s and early 90s over not only the Amiga and Atari ST
...

To be fair, the Atari ST monochrome display was way superior to what Apple had to offer (at a lower price).
More screen real estate, higher refresh rate, less flicker. 
It was just that for whatever reason apparently (everywhere except Germany) it was only recognized as a game machine and rarely sold with Atari's high quality monochrome monitors.

[tggzzz]

People who think they prefer "dark mode" probably have their monitors set to be like a blazing sun. Ideally, the intensity of "white" should be like a sheet of paper, not like an arc lamp.

Yes, well, for a good number of them, I think this is also largely because it's trendy. But yep as I said, you don't want blinding white either. Pale yellow/beige works great for backgrounds.

The trendiness is a significant problem. In a previous incarnation I had to do workstation risk assessments, and a lot of that was guiding people as to how to reduce reflections. Flat screens and black-on-white made a significant improvement.

As for colour, my terminal background has long been "255 235 205 BlanchedAlmond"

BTW: don't get me started on modern "flat" GUIs with no indication of what you can/can't press.

[SiliconWizard]

BTW: don't get me started on modern "flat" GUIs with no indication of what you can/can't press.

Which gets even worse when using touch screens. With a mouse pointer, at least you can hover over GUI items and the GUI can highlight them appropriately, and/or display some tip pop-up, or even change the mouse pointer so you see what is clickable. With touch interfaces, you get no pointer and thus nothing like this. So it's a double punishment.

[brucehoult]

...
For me, the huge advantage the Mac had in the 1980s and early 90s over not only the Amiga and Atari ST
...

To be fair, the Atari ST monochrome display was way superior to what Apple had to offer (at a lower price).
More screen real estate, higher refresh rate, less flicker. 

I see the monochrome monitor was 640x400 with a 71 Hz refresh.

While that is indeed bigger than the 512x342 display built into the compact Macs, it is smaller than the 640x480 display standard with the Mac II, or the 3rd party Radius FPD (640x870) that became available in 1986.

I don't dispute it was cheaper!

[SiliconWizard]

...
For me, the huge advantage the Mac had in the 1980s and early 90s over not only the Amiga and Atari ST
...

To be fair, the Atari ST monochrome display was way superior to what Apple had to offer (at a lower price).
More screen real estate, higher refresh rate, less flicker. 

I see the monochrome monitor was 640x400 with a 71 Hz refresh.

While that is indeed bigger than the 512x342 display built into the compact Macs, it is smaller than the 640x480 display standard with the Mac II, or the 3rd party Radius FPD (640x870) that became available in 1986.

I don't dispute it was cheaper!

And text was overall looking much better on the Mac even at a lower resolution.