The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity Review

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The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity ReviewI purchased this book with the hope of gaining some insight into Niklaus Wirth as a person and an educator. Wirth has made many contributions to the computer science field, so I was hoping for tales from his students and close friends that would relate some of the man behind the magic.
Instead the book reads very much like the proceedings of a technical conference (without a well-defined topic). In fact, many of the essays only relate to the book in that the authors were students of Wirth (or really appreciated his accomplishments) and they thanked Wirth in the introduction and conclusion. I did find a number of the essays to be interesting but I imagine that I could have found a very similar technical paper by searching the ACM or IEEE libraries.
There were few actual insights into Wirth as a person and little discussion of him as an educator. The overriding theme is, of course, that Wirth is a strong proponent of simplicity (it says as much in the title). However, the tie-ins to this theme in each essay usually amounted to simply stating that Wirth demanded simple solutions. A few essays did give some examples such as suggesting the use of simpler algorithms (that are good enough) in lieu of more complicated (and error-prone) but faster algorithms. However, a number of articles reported the number of lines of code and the number of different modules as proof of simplicity.
The book wasn't bad but it wasn't what I was hoping for (what ever is?) or what I had expected.The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity OverviewNiklaus Wirth is one of the great pioneers of computer technology and winner of the ACM's A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science. he has made substantial contributions to the development of programming languages, compiler construction, programming methodology, and hardware design. While working at ERH Zurich, he developed the languages Pascal and Modula-2. He also designed an early high performance workstation, the Personal Computer Lilith, and most recently the language and operating system Oberon. While Wirth has often been praised for his excellent work as a language designer and engineer, he is also an outstanding educator-something for which he is not as well known. This book brings together prominent computer scientists to describe Wirth's contributions to education. With the exception of some of his colleagues such as Professors Dijkstra, Hoare, and Rechenberg, all of the contributors to this book are students of Wirth. The essays provide a wide range of contemporary views on modern programming practice and also illuminate the one persistent and pervasive quality found in all his work: his unequivocal demand for simple solutions. The authors and editors hope to pass on their enthusiasm for simple engineering solutions along with their feeling for a man to whom they are all so indebted.

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