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.
EWD 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.
The 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.
It sounds like a classic case of the Second System effect. Where the original product was functional but a maybe little too basic, so everybody has an idea of how to improve it. Many of the ideas are good on their own, but the committee ends up accepting far too many and the thing suffers from terminal feature creep.
Perhaps we should make a language with a hard cap on the number of “features” in the language syntax + standard library. For everything you propose to add, you would then also need to propose something to remove.
Though in principal I love the idea, it would kill backwards compatibility. But maybe each major version revision should have a vote on keeping or removing some older features.
But not really - lots of new stuff was added - structures, unions, pointers, function pointers, operator definitions, a heap - all stuff that hadn't appeared in a language spec before, things we all see and use every day.
The big problem was that the language spec was incomprehensible (I've done a language implementation), trying to embed syntax and semantics into the one spec - the maths guys went a bit overboard there. The other main problem was trying to solve the reserved word problem by defining effectively multiple fonts/type faces for different parts of the language .... at a time when even lower case wasn't really an option for most people
>Algol-68 (or derivatives of) did rise to some prominence in one place – the USSR. The most prominent implementation of the language came from Leningrad State University. It was apparently used to design Russian telephone exchanges.
6-pass compiler for Algol-68 :) The telephone exchange was built on the base of the microcomputer (while developed in USSR/Russia, and ultimately that microcomputer was mostly used by the Russian military, the major customer for the exchange who funded the work at some point was Alcatel) which was like Tandem, only 3 instead of 2 systems in parallel because of low quality of electronics, the CPU was USSR-developed "Samson" [1], a kind of Elbrus offshoot. The exchange software was developed in SDL (Z.100, kind of like Erlang-by-European-commitee-in-1980ies) and compiled into Algol-68 which was compiled into that CPU codes.
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/
Algol 68 was certainly too much language for the tiny machines of 1970, but on a 2020 box it might be fairly decent.
EWD 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.
EWD is apparently Edsger W. Dijkstra for those also unaccustomed to reading him cited by his initials.
The 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/
Having EWD as a dissenter also seems a rather low bar, to be fair. (One might say he was a bit of a Edsgerlord.)
It sounds like a classic case of the Second System effect. Where the original product was functional but a maybe little too basic, so everybody has an idea of how to improve it. Many of the ideas are good on their own, but the committee ends up accepting far too many and the thing suffers from terminal feature creep.
Feature creep and Second System effect are all the rage now. Every recent language has them.
If you don't constantly have three dozen Requests for Implementation brewing, seven of which are going into the next release, you're a dead project.
Perhaps we should make a language with a hard cap on the number of “features” in the language syntax + standard library. For everything you propose to add, you would then also need to propose something to remove.
Though in principal I love the idea, it would kill backwards compatibility. But maybe each major version revision should have a vote on keeping or removing some older features.
Emergent property of humans, it turns out.
Algol 68 was to Algol as C++ is to C: trying to do too much resulting in over-complexity.
The two page spread showing a graph of the implicit type conversions was a masterpiece.
But not really - lots of new stuff was added - structures, unions, pointers, function pointers, operator definitions, a heap - all stuff that hadn't appeared in a language spec before, things we all see and use every day.
The big problem was that the language spec was incomprehensible (I've done a language implementation), trying to embed syntax and semantics into the one spec - the maths guys went a bit overboard there. The other main problem was trying to solve the reserved word problem by defining effectively multiple fonts/type faces for different parts of the language .... at a time when even lower case wasn't really an option for most people
>Algol-68 (or derivatives of) did rise to some prominence in one place – the USSR. The most prominent implementation of the language came from Leningrad State University. It was apparently used to design Russian telephone exchanges.
6-pass compiler for Algol-68 :) The telephone exchange was built on the base of the microcomputer (while developed in USSR/Russia, and ultimately that microcomputer was mostly used by the Russian military, the major customer for the exchange who funded the work at some point was Alcatel) which was like Tandem, only 3 instead of 2 systems in parallel because of low quality of electronics, the CPU was USSR-developed "Samson" [1], a kind of Elbrus offshoot. The exchange software was developed in SDL (Z.100, kind of like Erlang-by-European-commitee-in-1980ies) and compiled into Algol-68 which was compiled into that CPU codes.
[1] (in Russian) https://www.computer-museum.ru/articles/sistemi_kompleksi/90...