Special Issue of Informatics in Education honoring Niklaus Wirth
With this special issue we are thanking Niklaus Wirth for his pioneering work in the development of programming languages and in informatics education, and saluting his life's work. Both editors are very thankful for the great privilege to present eight papers that were very carefully selected and each fall into one or more of the above three categories. Walter Gander was a colleague of Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich, as well es a very close friend. In his paper (pages 783–790), he designs a novel recursive algorithm for quadrature in Pascal. In the introduction, he also provides some historical background on the early years of the language. Complementing, Tobias Kohn and Jacqueline Staub, both ETH alumni, take a deep dive into the history of Pascal and its place in the programming language landscape (pages 837–868). In particular, they compare Pascal with Python and analyze their common roots, similarities, and differences. Two papers discuss the impact that Pascal had in particular in Eastern European countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Valentina Dagienė, Gintautas Grigas, and Tatjana Jevsikova describe (pages 735–765) in a lot of fascinating detail how Pascal shaped early programming education in Lithuania. Maciej Sysło tells the exciting story of the central role Pascal played in Poland (pages 869–882), and why it was the language of choice for many who took part in competitive programming. Three of the papers do not directly address Pascal, but introduce programming languages that follow the above call for simplicity. Paul Biberstein, Thomas Castleman, Luming Chen, and Shriram Krishnamurthi present CODAP Transformers (pages 723–734), which adds functions to the CODAP programming environment with a focus on data science education. Judith Gal-Ezer and Smadar Szekely introduce the gaming platform Spark by MyQ (pages 767–781) that aims at fostering computational problem-solving abilities in school students of grades four and beyond. In an autoethnographic paper, Felienne Hermans describes the history of her programming language Hedy (pages 791–822), and what drove her design decisions, in particular why her language is built around cognitive load theory. Finally, Michael Kölling zooms out and looks at the bigger picture of programming education and the design of programming languages (pages 823–836). His conclusion is that there will never be “the” programming language, and that every generation of learners needs their own language. Citing from Kohn's and Staub's paper: “Even Wirth himself hoped that Pascal would make way some day to the next steps in evolution and not become a hindrance to progress itself.” But even if everything is just a snapshot and the world keeps spinning, Pascal left a giant mark (and is still used by many), and so did Niklaus Wirth. Further Reading |
Niklaus
Wirth, one of the most influential pioneers of computer
science, passed away in Zurich on January 1st of this year. His contributions
to software engineering and especially to programming languages are
fundamental, unique, and simply amazing. And they have had a huge impact on
computer science education worldwide.