Submitted by Wouter via email . . .

While I was reading about Niklaus Wirth on Wikipedia, I realized that he’s starting to get old (he’s 75 now), and there are some thing I’d like to know or hear from him.

Why not have a short interview with him?

I’m sure it’ll be interesting what the man has to say, and it shouldn’t be too hard to get in touch with him.

· Certain decisions and compromised he’s made when designing Pascal;

· If he’s used Delphi;

· If he’s aware of recent language modifications like anonymous methods and generics, and what his views are on that;

· Things he finds missing in today’s pascal flavors (probably most of the stuff that’s in Oberon and Component Pascal);

· His views on certain technologies (dotnet);

· His views on Garbage collection (according to http://www.oberon.ch/pdf/CP-Lang.pdf, Component Pascal has GC) ;

· Maybe it would be nice for the much under-appreciated fpc folks if fpc is shortly discussed;

· Maybe talk through the early years when Pascal was being created;

· Maybe later on talk through the years where turbo pascal was gaining popularity and his work on Modula and Oberon;

· Talk about his personal life, and how he spends his days nowadays..

I’m sure there are plenty of other things can be talked about.

Ah, before sending this e-mail, I did a web search to see if there are any recent interviews with prof. Wirth, and I found this recent one:

http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/niklaus-wirth-geek-of-the-week/

oh, and this one, with video.. ok, that sort of makes some of the above points redundant..

http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/videos/niklauswirth

I would love to hear Nick Bradbury (http://nick.typepad.com/), creator of FeedDemon interviewed. He is in the enviable position of being paid to write great software that his company allows him to distribute for free.

He is also known for his approach to simplifying software and removing features instead of constantly adding new ones and was recently the credited inspiration for a new Google Reader feature (http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/08/flurry-of-features-for-feed-readers.html).

I would love to hear about how Nick got started on shareware development and about how his development process works as well as what have been his greatest programming realisations over the past years have been.