I have a soft spot for Modula-2 too. It was verbose (which I didn't mind) and used all-caps for some syntax which didn't look nice. It featured coroutines for c

I have a soft spot for Modula-2 too. It was verbose (which I didn't mind) and used all-caps for some syntax which didn't look nice. It featured coroutines for concurrent programming with a very readable syntax. Wirth felt the language was too large (although this is all relative since Modula-2 is smaller than many modern languages) and so Oberon, his next language, was deliberately pared down to the smallest number of keywords and features he could manage. I've always liked this philosophy and still think a smaller language is preferable to a larger language in many cases. There's something satisfying about knowing all the features of a language - you actually feel you might be able to master it.