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He wrote this in 1975, dissing most of the popular programming languages of the time. Does anyone know which language Dijkstra didn't think was a mess? (and ple
by skrebbel 6y ago
He wrote this in 1975, dissing most of the popular programming languages of the time. Does anyone know which language Dijkstra didn't think was a mess? (and please don't say GCL, his own unrunnable toy language)
I mean, if FORTRAN is a mess, then isn't ALGOL too? Is anyone here old enough to remember?
- jolux 6y agoAlgol is quite different from Fortran.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoIf I understand correctly, ALGOL had better ways of structuring code into functions than FORTRAN did. This let ALGOL do what eventually was called "structured programming", and FORTRAN do what was called "plate of spaghetti" programming. This is not the same as saying that EWD thought that ALGOL was good...
- User23 6y agoI imagine he had at least some fondness for Algol 60 since he is co-credited with writing the first compiler for it.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoThat might give you fondness. Or disgust. In his case, I have no data about which one won.
- Joker_vD 6y agoWell, Dijkstra together with Zonneveld wrote the first ever implementation of ALGOL 60, and, in fact, heavy-handed the recursive procedure calls into the language. If not for him, who knows, Quicksort may have not been invented for another decade or so. ALGOL 68, on the other hand... "The more I see of it, the more unhappy I become." [0] [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD230.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/E...