Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth (born 1934 in Switzerland) is one of the most prominent computer scientists, mostly known for creating Pascal and several other programming languages.

A lot of Wirth's work is related to concretely proving that bloat is not a necessity and that smaller and more elegant computing is possible:

The Lilith workstation, the design of which started in the late 1970s, was Wirth's idea of a personal computer. It was inspired by the ?Xerox Alto but was particularly aimed at students. It was designed to be powerful enough while being simple enough to be understood by a single person (such as a computing student). Lilith is thoroughly built around the Modula-2 programming language, even the microcode is compiled from a variant of Modula-2. The stack-based instruction set architecture reached competitive speeds particularly thanks to the high code density, and it also helped keep the Modula-2 compiler fast and simple. Unfortunately, Lilith was a commercial failure, and less than 200 were built.

?Oberon is an operating system centered around the ?object-oriented Oberon programming language, with the guiding principles of clarity and simplicity. A major reason to its existence was proving that a full graphical and modern operating system with a software development environment is possible in a moderate size (a couple of hundred kilobytes). It was also used by Wirth as an example of lean software. Oberon is still being developed and maintained, and Wirth himself is still involved with the project.