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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