Wirth Jokes

Part 2 (Languages) - (Original author: nobody@hangout. rutgers. edu)
-----------------------------------------------
The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language (s)he uses.
Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of PASCAL,
gave a talk once at which he was asked, "How do you pronounce your name?" He replied, "You can call
me either by name, pronouncing it' Veert', or call me by value' Worth'." One can tell immediately from this
comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real
Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM/370 FORTRAN-G and H compilers. Real
programmers don't need all these abstract concepts to get their job done - they are perfectly happy with
a keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler and a beer.
- Real Programmers do List Processing in FORTRAN.
- more...

In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian
Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an
elaborate prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development
Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I
had started work with an early release of Pascal from Professor Niklaus Wirth's ETH labs in
Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished
reading' Bored of the Rings', a National Lampoon parody of the Tolkien's' Lord of the Rings' trilogy.
As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were
responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new OS to be as
complex and cryptic as more...