wirth

The work started when Wirth saw the same Xerox setup that Apple did.

Check Niklaus Wirth work on Modula-2 and Oberon, and its respective OS.

The first system Wirth and Jurg Gutknecht designed was Lilith [1].

Like multiple return statements… Wirth really likes his minimalism.

I'd have used a Wirth language if I knew of them then.

The brilliance of Wirth was keeping things simple.

It is specifically Oberon-07[0], a 2007 revision of the original Oberon from 1986, which is still being worked on by Niklaus Wirth with updates as recently as this year.

I can't remember.) Again it wasn't the implementation of Algol68 that was important (the language as specified was too hard to implement) it was the ideas it suggested to future language designers--in fact, Niklaus Wirth quit the Algol68 design committee with the idea that Algol ought to go in a simpler direction, which led to Pascal.

As part of the Niklaus Wirth Birthday Symposium to celebrate his 80th birthday he also gave a talk titled "Reviving a computer system of 25 years ago" (Abstract[0], Slides[1], Video[2]).

That way people might stop asking me things like whether OS's can be written in "managed code." Stock reply: "type Niklaus Wirth or Oberon System into Google."

On that note, you can gain a good amount of perspective by reading on the "losing side" of history: Ada, Multics, Wirth's languages, Lisp machines, Smalltalk, etc.

Oberon is an already-built system designed by Niklaus Wirth, one of the giants of the field.

A friend who pushes Go on other forums talked about how it reminded him of programming in his favorite, Wirth-style languages.

Wirth's work shows simplifying the interfaces, implementation, and so on can certainly help.