"The order of Things", constitutes a milestone in modern philosophy and sociology. It fundamentally changed the idea of cultural history and secured Foucault the reputation as one of the main philosophers and sociologists of the late 20th century. With its theories of empirical knowledge and the laws of language, the present work profoundly influenced Maurice Nivat, who would later refer to Foucault as the source of best understanding the real state of written and spoken utterings, their insecurity or universality and their connection with the language in which they are expressed (see eg. M. Nivat: Ordre et informatique, in: Cahiers Philosophiques, 2015). 

In his foreword to the English translation of Les Mots et les choses, Foucault describes his project as follows: "But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well-defined regularity? If the very possibility of recording facts, of allowing oneself to be convinced by them, of distorting them in traditions or of making purely speculative use of them, if even this was not at the mercy of chance? If errors (and truths), the practice of old beliefs, including not only genuine discoveries, but also the most naive notions, obeyed, at a given moment, the laws of a certain code of knowledge? If, in short, the history of non-formal knowledge had itself a system? That was my initial hypothesis - the first risk I took. ... What I wished to do was to present, side by side, a definite number of elements: the knowledge of living beings, the knowledge of the laws of language, and the knowledge of economic facts, and to relate them to the philosophical discourse that was contemporary with them during a period extending from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century." Thus also laying the foundation for a modern philosophical theory of the knowledge of the laws of language, one that clearly resonated with Maurice Nivat, who would later come to revolutionize the fields of formal languages and semantics. 

Maurice Paul Nivat (1937 - 2017) was a seminal French computer scientist, referred to as one of the fathers of theoretical computer science, whose research in computer science spanned the areas of formal languages, programming language semantics, and discrete geometry.  He was a professor at the University Paris Diderot until 2001.

"The role of Maurice in our field has been overwhelming. First of all he has been a great scientist who contributed fundamental research work in a variety of fields ranging from formal languages and automata theory to semantics and, more recently, to tilings and discrete geometry. His rigorous and deep algebraic approach, inherited from his mentor Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger, has permeated for long time the French school of theory of computing. In his academic activity he raised an incredible series of brilliant computer scientists who are now among the most prominent researchers in their domain.
But for computer scientists in Europe and worldwide, the role and the merits of Maurice go way beyond his scientific activity. In 1971 Maurice, started to undertake initiatives at European level, in cooperation with Alfonso Caracciolo, with the aim to gain an international recognition for a research domain that was moving its first steps: l'informatique théorique and to gather the European community of researchers in this field. In 1972 this effort successfully led to the foundation of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. To the Association Maurice devoted a lot of energy both as President (from 1972 to 1977) and first Bulletin editor and, more generally, as supporter and advisor. Again in 1972 Maurice intiated the ICALP series of conferences, organizing for the first time in Paris a conference on automata, languages and programming that is now one of the top world conferences in the field of theory of computing. In 1973 Maurice started another initiative that became, again, a success story: the series of Spring schools, known as 'Ecole de Printemps en Informatique Théorique', that are still going on and annually gather top world scientists. In 1975 the first issue of the journal Theoretical Computer Science was published by North Holland. The journal, that had been originally conceived as the journal of EATCS, thanks to the inexhaustible energy of Maurice and his farsighted view of the main relevant directions of computing theory, immediately became one of the most important journals in the field. Maurice remained Editor in Chief of the journal for 25 years, and brought it to the current level of excellence." (Obituary in European Association for Thoretical Computer Science)