Algol Sixty Syndrome

AlgolSixty was (and is) widely known as an elegant and concise language; a trait which its creators (TonyHoare and others - TonyHoareOnAlgolSixty) were rightly proud of.

However, it had a fundamental flaw which limited its use; the language proper provided no I/O facilities. I/O was deemed to be an implementation-defined feature; and many implementations defined it - but it was impossible to write a program in AlgolSixty which was both portable (avoiding any feature not guaranteed to work in all implementations) and useful (in this case, capable of interfacing to the outside world).

In short, the language was too minimalistic.

Today, AlgolSixty is pretty much a historical footnote; however numerous other languages have taken a minimalist approach (though not to the extent of AlgolSixty) - resulting in criticism that such languages, though elegant and pretty, are not suitable for "real" work. Much real work does get done in these languages, but the results often don't port between implementations.


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