Tony Hoare On Algol Sixty

TonyHoare described AlgolSixty as follows:

Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on on nearly all its successors. (HINTS ON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE DESIGN, Dec 1973, available at e.g. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~necula/cs263/handouts/hoarehints.pdf)

Time, it seems, hasn't been particularly kind to that observation. Does this make CarHoare the first SmugAlgolWeenie?????

I believe the number one criticism of Algol 60 was for its lack of portable I/O facilities, which doesn't seem particularly scathing, no matter how much it held back the use of the language. (Note that there are far more criticisms of Algol-68; is that what you were thinking of?)

• Algol-68 has its own issues. AlgolSixty has a few other things widely considered a mistake (such as CallByName). Of course, few languages have been as influential as AlgolSixty. There are probably very few languages today which can't trace some part of their lineage back to AlgolSixty.

As for SmugAlgolWeenie? -- sure, I guess so.

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CategoryQuote, CategoryAlgol