He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering.

[6] In 1968, he became a professor of informatics at ETH Zürich, taking two one-year sabbaticals at Xerox PARC in California (1976–1977 and 1984–1985).

In 2004, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for seminal work in programming languages and algorithms, including Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon.

[16][17] In 1984, Wirth received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award for the development of these languages.

[19] In 1999, he received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award[20] In 1995, he popularized the adage now named Wirth's law.

[25][26] The article was discussed by Fred Brooks in his influential book The Mythical Man-Month and was described as "seminal" in the ACM's brief biography of Wirth published in connection to his Turing Award.

[30] The cover flap, of the 1973 edition, stated the book "... is tailored to the needs of people who view a course on systematic construction of algorithms as part of their basic mathematical training, rather than to the immediate needs of those who wish to be able to occasionally encode a problem and hand it over to their computer for instant solution.