Success Quote by Niklaus Wirth

A programming course lives or dies on its props. Wirth, the engineer behind Pascal and a champion of disciplined software design, isn’t making a cozy pedagogical suggestion; he’s issuing a systems-level warning. “Experience shows” is the quiet flex of someone who has watched cohorts succeed, stall, and fail in repeatable patterns. The line refuses the comforting myth that teaching programming is mostly about syntax, or that motivated students will power through any curriculum. The examples are the curriculum.

Wirth’s subtext is that examples smuggle in a worldview. Pick examples that are “cute” but structurally dishonest, and students absorb bad habits: magical thinking about state, sloppy abstractions, code that works once but can’t be reasoned about. Pick examples that are too ornate or domain-specific, and you turn programming into a memorization contest where only the already-initiated can decode the hidden rules. The right examples make invisible concepts tangible: decomposition, invariants, data representation, algorithmic tradeoffs. They teach taste.

Context matters: Wirth came up in an era when computing was resource-constrained and correctness was a professional obligation, not an aspirational slogan. His design philosophy emphasized clarity, simplicity, and the idea that complexity is a cost you should justify. In that light, “choice of these examples” is a moral claim about the craft. Show students programs that can be explained, tested, and trusted, and you’re not just teaching them to code; you’re teaching them what good software should feel like.