Wirth was born on 15 February 1934, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1959, a Master of Science in 1960, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering in Computer Science in 1963. From 1963 to 1967 he served as Assistant Professor at Stamford University's Computer Science department, then Professor of Informatics at ETH Zurich until his retirement in 1999. He took two one-year sabbaticals during that time to work at Xerox PARC.

Wirth is well-remembered for his pioneering work in programming languages and algorithms. For these achievements, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1984, inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 1994, and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2004.

They include, among many, being chief designer for the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1968), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007).

Of these, perhaps the best-known and most used is Pascal. It was the major teaching language of introductory Computer Science courses well until the 1990s when Java, and later Python, began to take over. Pascal was also a significant commercial programming language, popularised by Borland's Turbo Pascal which evolved into Object Pascal and Delphi, under Anders Hejslberg. Delphi was a major success in the early days of Windows 16-bit and 32-bit software development, competing directly with Microsoft Visual BASIC. Hejslberg was later recruited by Microsoft where he created the C# programming language, and is also the lead architect of TypeScript.

Hejslberg is only one of the many, many people around the world who have continued to contribute to technology on the back of Wirth's impressive ground-breaking and significant achievements and activity. Wirth was heavily focused on the importance of algorithms and data structures as the basis for excellent computer software. His 1975 book was, in fact, titled Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs and has remained a source of inspiration for many in the decades since.

Wirth joked that his own name was a computer science pun; you could refer him to by reference ("Wirth") or by value ("Worth").

Wirth passed away on the first day of the year, 1 January 2024, at the good age of 89.

We lost a titan of programming languages, programming methodology, software engineering and hardware design. Niklaus Wirth passed away on the first of January. We mourn a pioneer, colleague, mentor and friend.

— Bertrand Meyer (@Bertrand_Meyer) January 3, 2024