4 ms·
There's a lot of hearsay in that articles, and a lot of sentiment rooted in the particulars of that time. Sure, it was a complex thing in the late 60s/early 70
by mhd 2y ago
There's a lot of hearsay in that articles, and a lot of sentiment rooted in the particulars of that time.
Sure, it was a complex thing in the late 60s/early 70s. Sure, Wirth came up with something simpler. But I'm missing a deeper analysis, especially with a more modern view point where basically any language is at least as complex as Algol 68[0].
> Arguably Wirth’s Algol-W was a better successor to Algol-60
I might not even disagree, but what were the arguments, and how are they holding up?
> and arguably did not have the same connections to industry as the likes of Fortran and Cobol
Sure. But neither did Algol-W or Pascal. And pretty much anything else in the 20th century.
[0]: http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/ http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/
- aidenn0 2y agoEWD comes up as a dissenter for Algol-68, and the longer my career as a software developer the more I disagree with him on anything that isn't pure math.
- mhd 2y agoHaving EWD as a dissenter also seems a rather low bar, to be fair. (One might say he was a bit of a Edsgerlord.)
- le-mark 2y agoEWD is apparently Edsger W. Dijkstra for those also unaccustomed to reading him cited by his initials.
- User23 2y agoThe appellation is in some part due to his custom of writing monographs for himself titled EWD-n[1]. They are a fascinating mix of deep mathematical and philosophical insight and curmudgeonly reflective essaying. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/
- 082349872349872 2y ago> writing monographs for himself One might almost call it a "blog" if it weren't for the fact that EWD started ~35 years before Frontier NewsPage.
- sevensor 2y agoYeah, if EWD had had his way, very little software would ever have been written. I think his insistence on proving the correctness of imperative programs is understandable but entirely wrong headed. The sheer amount of insight needed to get through the working day would be unattainable by most and unsustainable for all but a few.
- 73kl4453dz 2y agoAlgol 68 was certainly too much language for the tiny machines of 1970, but on a 2020 box it might be fairly decent.
- manbart 2y agoThere is a modern implementation if you feel like checking it out firsthand https://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/en.algol-68-genie.html https://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/en.algol-68-genie.html
- Taniwha 2y agoNot really, I did an implementation in the late 70s, ran on a mainframe of the time (1MHz 6Mb). The language itself is not much more than modern C in scope - and in fact many ideas that were new in 68 are expected in modern languages The big problem was that the spec was essentially unreadable.