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It was pretty much dead by the mid-70s. PASCAL, C, FORTRAN, and COBOL killed it on mainframes + minis and it was too complex for micros. (Thus - BASIC.) The tw
by TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
It was pretty much dead by the mid-70s. PASCAL, C, FORTRAN, and COBOL killed it on mainframes + minis and it was too complex for micros. (Thus - BASIC.)
The twitching corpse lived on in the form of JOVIAL for DOD work (until ADA happened), and CORAL persisted in the UK because of bureaucratic momentum. Simula was another derivative that lasted for a while.
But C and PASCAL were better, simpler, equally productive languages. As soon as they appeared ALGOL 60 didn't really need to exist any more. And ALGOL 68 was an ALGOL too far.
- int_19h 2y agoLest we forget, Pascal itself was an evolution of Algol-W, which was basically Algol with pointers and records. So in that sense, Pascal and the entire family of languages that it spawned are all direct descendants. Algol 68 doesn't really have anything in common with Algol 60 apart from name. The syntax is completely different, as is the overall feel of the language.
- musicale 2y agoW being Wirth.
- jamesfinlayson 2y agoInteresting - I remember working with someone that told me that they'd seen an ALGOL codebase finally get decommissioned in 2005 (the replacement system had run in parallel with it for a few years first) after first going live in 1979. It surprised me because people talk about COBOL and Fortran being dead, but ALGOL always seemed really dead, and I couldn't believe that there was still ALGOL running this century.