School of Niklaus Wirth
by László Böszörményi, Gustav Pomberger · first published 2000
20mentions
6recommended by
15HN commenters
2011–2026first – last mentioned
40% recommend60% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Collection of essays by Wirth's colleagues and students covering his work on hardware, software and core CS concepts; praised as entertaining and well written, suited to anyone interested in simple, clear system design.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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"The School of Niklaus Wirth" [0] contains this essay and many others on how simplicity can be an essential quality of a system. I vastly under appreciated how well Wirthian languages are designed, even after toying with the excellent…
on “Compiler Construction: The Art of Niklaus Wirth (2000) [pdf]” ↗…one of the luminary people in computing. Definitely take a look at his books, they are extremely concise and to the point. Also interesting (but less so than Wirth's actual writing) is the book "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity". Interestingly he was the Martin Oderskey's (Scala etc) PhD advisor.
on “Native Oberon” ↗I think some of the concepts of Oberon have been implemented in Plan 9. Whenever Oberon is mentioned, I want to recommend the book "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity" (I think this even contains a variant of the linked article).
on “Oberon – The Overlooked Jewel (2000) [pdf]” ↗Niklaus Wirth fans will appreciate the (apparently out of print) book "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity", written by some of Wirth's students about his and their research work with languages, operating systems, and the Lilith computer. https://amzn.com/1558607234
on “Fast Compilers for Fast Programs” ↗If you're a fan of Niklaus Wirth, I recommend The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity, a book of essays by Wirth's colleagues and students about some of his work. http://www.amzn.com/dp/1558607234/
on “Oberon-2, a hi-performance alternative to C++ (1996)” ↗The same (or a very similar) article can be found in the really, really great book "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity", which is a collection of high quality, highly entertaining essays about hardware, software and general CS concepts.
on “Oberon – The Overlooked Jewel [pdf]” ↗…Forth should have interactive experiences that the other languages do not have. The Pascal related languages are renowned for being designed to be compiled at high speed. This is a wonderful book, "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity" https://tkurtbond.github.io/posts/2022/07/04/the-school-of-n... Esp this chapter on the Wirthian way of designing compilers https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221350529_Compiler_...…
on “Deno: You don't need a build step” ↗…linage like Ada, Object Pascal, Modula-2 and others. Hence why from C culture point of view they used to be referred to as programming with straightjacket. An insight into this be read on books like "The School of Niklaus Wirth" or "Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK".
on “Rust's Culture of Semantic Precision” ↗The latter is lifted from “The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity,” which is a worthwhile volume for anyone with an interest in this stuff.
on “Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)” ↗I've been reading a lot about Niklaus Wirth recently. I read an interesting piece about Oberon I found in an HN archive[0] that mentions Oberon usage on Macs. I'm very tempted to buy "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity" after reading a few things about him. I wish there were more instances of "computing in a vacuum" like at ETH. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058486
on “Pascal at Apple” ↗This looks to be the original publication [1]: Hanspeter Mössenböck: Compiler Construction - The Art of Niklaus Wirth. Chapter in: Böszörmeny et al.(eds): The School of Niklaus Wirth, dpunkt.verlag 2000, pp.55-68 An extensive list of Mössenböck's publications can be found here[2] [1] http://ssw.jku.at/Research/Papers/Moe00b.html [2] http://ssw.jku.at/Research/Papers/ (while this…
on “Compiler Construction: The Art of Niklaus Wirth (2000) [pdf]” ↗> in: Böszörmeny et al.(eds): The School of Niklaus Wirth I used to have that book somewhere. All of it was nicely typeset, except for Dijkstra's chapter, which was facsimile copies of (nicely) handwritten text.
on “Compiler Construction: The Art of Niklaus Wirth (2000) [pdf]” ↗Quote from Niklaus Wirth: > ... I would feel utterly incapable of constructing a good compiler for Ada. Source: The School of Niklaus Wirth - "The Art of Simplicity"
on “Ten Years of Using SPARK to Build CubeSat Nano Satellites with Students” ↗Just discovered Wirth's book The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity. I would like to know if it's worth the time investment?
on “Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth [pdf]” ↗It's from the "Oberon - The Overlooked Jewel" chapter by Michael Franz, in The School of Niklaus Wirth, "The Art of Simplicity". http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90....
on “Oberon 07 compiler – written in JavaScript and translates to JavaScript” ↗