Wirth had a great impact on the programming languages field. He received the Turing Award in 1984 for his contributions. I believe Nim has been inspired by some Wirthian languages (particularly Modula 3, Delphi, and Oberon), according to the FAQ:
The language borrows heavily from (in order of impact): Modula 3, Delphi, Ada, C++, Python, Lisp, Oberon.
He had tremendous impact on generations of language designers and programmers who benefited from his approach to simplicity and correctness. May he RIP.
there is a very nice and long interview here (from 4 years ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUgrS_KbSI8
Would be very much interested in understanding more on how his work impacted Nim, I never studied Wirth's work, I only know what is generic knowledge acquired through following Nim. From the top of my head:
To this I would probably add a quote from the end of the interview, answering the question: "What was the unifying theme of all your projects?": > Make things as regular and as well-structured and as simple as they can be without losing sight of their purpose. Undue complexity is a bad thing. And it's unnecessary. (Except in the modern commercial world, it's often used to hide inadequacies. If something is intransparent, it's much harder to copy)
Would be very much interested in understanding more on how his work impacted Nim, I never studied Wirth's work
Well Wirth created 3 (actually it was more than that but I cannot remember the name for his "expression based assembler") languages: Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon. Nim's syntax took quite a lot from these except doing away with begin end and semicolons and replacing them with indentation. The idea behind Nim's OOP (all you need is single inheritance) comes from Oberon, the "system" default import comes from Pascal.
However, the more important design choices (IMHO) came from Modula 3: Distinguish between "traced" and "untraced" pointers and Ada: Make parameters immutable so that it's easier to pass by pointer behind the scenes.
That said, in this day and age Wirth's languages have a rather bizzare feature set as we never got to see a Wirthian solution for generics, concurrency, "not nil" safety, sum types and error handling.