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> I really don't see Wirth in reality as a huge influence in the history of programming language design. C# is influenced by Pascal and Modula-2 because Anders

> I really don't see Wirth in reality as a huge influence in the history of programming language design. C# is influenced by Pascal and Modula-2 because Anders Hejlsberg had a huge hand in creating it. Go and Lua are also quite heavily influenced by the Wirthian languages. Ada is also a direct descendant of Pascal and Modula-2. For a while in the 80's, Ada was more popular than C++ because of the DoD standardizing on it but the DoD and NASA still use it today. NASA's Artemis project uses Ada. The Canadian air traffic controls system all run Ada. Wirthian languages have been focused on safety for 50 years. The industry is just now catching up with safety-focused Rust as a first step. It's long overdue. C and C++ were dangerous enough offline but using them online is just asking to get hacked. Sure, safe code can be written in them but not many C and C++ programmers are capable of doing so. Why wouldn't you want a language that handled the bulk of that for you?

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
C# is really managed C, and the C lineage is more ALGOL -> BCPL -> B - > C Sure Ada saw some success, and is even a pretty decent language, but I fail to see that there is much Wirth in there, certainly not his minimalist aesthetic!
- timbit42 4y ago
  Wirth became minimalist with Oberon, which came after Modula-2 and Ada.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Lets not forget that Wirth was on the ALGOL design group, and Pascal was initially designed as it saw ALGOL as being too complex for teaching purposes. So there is a little bit of Wirth on ALGOL as well.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
    I don't believe Wirth was involved with any of the official ALGOL versions. He submitted his own proposal for an ALGOL-60 replacement which was rejected and became ALGOL-W (Wirth), which I briefly used in college c.1979. The actual successor to ALGOL-60 was ALGOL-68 which Wirth had no input on. There's a useful language family tree on the WikiPedia ALGOL page. ALGOL is really the grandfather of all modern structured programming languages. I guess the way it was named "Algol = Algorithmic language" about says it all.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago

C# is really managed C, and the C lineage is more ALGOL -> BCPL -> B - > C Sure Ada saw some success, and is even a pretty decent language, but I fail to see that there is much Wirth in there, certainly not his minimalist aesthetic!

timbit42 4y ago
Wirth became minimalist with Oberon, which came after Modula-2 and Ada.
pjmlp 4y ago
Lets not forget that Wirth was on the ALGOL design group, and Pascal was initially designed as it saw ALGOL as being too complex for teaching purposes. So there is a little bit of Wirth on ALGOL as well.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  I don't believe Wirth was involved with any of the official ALGOL versions. He submitted his own proposal for an ALGOL-60 replacement which was rejected and became ALGOL-W (Wirth), which I briefly used in college c.1979. The actual successor to ALGOL-60 was ALGOL-68 which Wirth had no input on. There's a useful language family tree on the WikiPedia ALGOL page. ALGOL is really the grandfather of all modern structured programming languages. I guess the way it was named "Algol = Algorithmic language" about says it all.