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

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

It is interesting to see this Great Convergence. Even PHP, which started off as a quick-and-dirty language with deliberately vague expressions, converges to the same standard.

In my 30-something years of programming (admittedly my first programs were toy-like Pascal pieces of code), I saw only one improvement in this Algol-like style that I considered major: named arguments. Their use improves code readability, at least for me.