Modula-2 was created by Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth was born in February 1934 in Winterthur (Switzerland). He received the degree of Electronics Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1959, an M.Sc. from Laval University, Canada, in 1960. Then in 1963 he was awarded a Ph.D.in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley.

From 1963 to 1967 he served as assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zurich. Then in 1968 he became Professor of Informatics at ETH Zürich, taking a two year sabbatical at Xerox PARC in California.

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2 and Oberon. He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the Lilith and Oberon operating systems, and for the Lola digital hardware design and simulation system. He received the ACM Turing Award for the development of these languages and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM.

His article Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, about the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering. In 1975 he wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide recognition and is still useful today.

He is retired since April 1999.