Success Quote by Niklaus Wirth

Extensible programming sounds like a calm engineering preference until you hear the polemic underneath: Wirth is drawing a line against software as a pile of clever hacks. His phrasing, almost bureaucratically spare, is doing rhetorical work. “Ultimate goal” elevates modularity from a technique to a moral endpoint. In Wirth’s world, the system isn’t something you tinker with; it’s something you grow.

The key move is “hierarchies of modules.” Hierarchy implies order, a disciplined layering where each piece knows its place. That’s a direct rebuttal to the improvisational sprawl that large codebases slide into when deadlines and feature demands start calling the shots. EP isn’t merely about reuse; it’s about making change safe. If each module “adds new functionality,” then the old stays intact, legible, and testable. Progress becomes accumulation rather than renovation.

The context matters: Wirth helped shape structured programming and designed languages (Pascal, Modula, Oberon) built for clarity, not maximal expressiveness. This quote sits inside that broader campaign: software should be comprehensible to humans, not just executable by machines. The subtext is a warning that complexity is not an inevitability; it’s a design failure. By insisting on “construction,” he frames programming as architecture, not alchemy - and he’s implicitly asking who you’re building for: the next feature request, or the next programmer who has to live in your code.