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Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language (1981) [pdf]

(doc.cat-v.org)
71 points susam | 1 comments | 13 Apr 25 14:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.291s | source
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behnamoh ◴[13 Apr 25 16:39 UTC] No.43674020[source]▶
Looks like in the 70s and 80s, it was wild west for programming language design. So many ideas floating around. But over the decades, most converged to the Algol-style (statements, curly braces, often using semicolons, type before identifier, etc.). Look at what we did to programming:

- Java, C, C++, C#, Kotlin, Rust, Swift, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, ... → they look more or less the same

Compare with these ones that didn't catch on as much as the ones above:

- ML/Haskell, Erlang, Elixir, APL, Common Lisp (and other Lisps), Lua, Pascal, Delphi, BASIC, Visual Basic, VBA, VBScript, SmallTalk,... → each one bringing something refreshingly new to the PL design space

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1. saghm ◴[13 Apr 25 17:25 UTC] No.43674340[source]▶
It feels like you're mixing together a lot of ideas that don't really fit together very well. In terms of syntax, only four of the languages you describe as "more or less the same" in terms of how they look use "type before identifier" like you mention. On the other hand, four of them use the ML-style syntax of identifier-colon-type, one uses identifier before type with no colon, and the final one doesn't even have type annotations. At least four of them don't require semicolons either, and I'd argue that at least in Go, having semicolons at all would probably strike people as odd. You've also left out Python, which doesn't fit any of those syntax descriptions you gave and more popular than at least half of the ones you did include.

The timeline of 70s and 80s also doesn't really seem to fit with what you're saying either. Of the languages you mention either as "more or less the same" or "refreshingly new", the ones from either the 70s or 80s are C, C++, ML, Smalltalk, Pascal, and Smalltalk; all of the other "refreshingly new" ones are from either before or after those years. Common Lisp was from the 80s, but the syntax originated with LISP in the 50s, so if you're going to go with the most common variant, I'd argue you should also remove ML from the list and replace it with OCaml, which is from the 90s.

Even more significantly, it feels like you're comparing apples and oranges with the discussion of syntax at the beginning and then talking about bringing something new to the PL design space after. I'd guess that most people involved in PL design find syntax to be the least interesting aspect of it, and I think it's hard to argue that none of the languages you described as looking similar brought anything new to the PL design space.