On Sunday, Februrary 16th, 2020, Larry Tesler passed away, aged 74. Larry Tesler was an outstanding computing pioneer. Many techniques and foundations of modern software design including copy & paste, modeless user interfaces etc. trace back to his ideas.
Most notably, Larry Tesler was one of the founders of Object Pascal. Based on Pascal, Smalltalk and an earlier attempt called Clascal he defined a modern object-oriented version of Pascal in cooperation with Niklaus Wirth, when working at Apple in the 1980s. This new Pascal implementation, called Object Pascal, was the foundation of the Lisa Toolkit and MacApp, two RAD IDEs for the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers. They were the first examples of graphical object-oriented IDEs. Like their target operating systems Lisa OS and Mac OS they were based on (and written in) Pascal variants.
Later, the concepts of Object Pascal were adopted by Borland for TurboPascal and subsequently for Delphi. Other implementations including THINK Pascal, GNU Pascal and, of course, Free Pascal, continued and extended his pioneering ideas.
R.I.P.
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