That led him to quip, "In Europe I'm called by name, but in the US I'm called by value."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth
https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063519...
> Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.
It is refreshing to see the old-fashioned trope of the genius computer scientist / software enginieer as a "foreigner to the world" being contested again and again by stories like this.
Of course people like Niklaus Wirth are exceptional in many ways, so it might be that the trope has/had some grain of truth, that just does not co-correlate with the success of said person :)
And of course people might want to argue about the differences betweem SE, CS and economics.
After all that rambling... RIP and thank you Niklaus!
We should take them away.
It reminds me of my only meeting with Andy Tanenbaum / AAT [0], one of the smartest, nicest computer science guy I've ever met in my life. I can't recall the many puns and jokes he shared, but it was just incredible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15361069
at the end of the comment.
"Wit" is just wrong. Perhaps that was a joke that I missed about the man's humour.
He was Swiss, more exactly from the city of Winterthur located in the canton (state) of Zürich. The canton's official language is German, however. Of course, people over there speak in a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch".
> a strong local dialect called "Züritüütsch".
Damn, I've never seen a word with three u-umlauts in it. How the hell do you pronounce two consecutive u-umlauts? "eu-eu"?
Wirth lived in the United States for some time throughout his life but is a Zürich native. He must have spoken Züritüütsch („Zurich German“) privately, I am pretty sure (without having known him personally).