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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: 0.201s | 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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duskwuff ◴[13 Apr 25 17:37 UTC] No.43674434[source]▶
I'd hesitate to say that Lua "didn't catch on". It's extremely popular as an embeddable scripting language, particularly in game development.

Another counterexample to consider is Python. It's quite unlike Algol, but that certainly hasn't stopped it from becoming popular.

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1. msla ◴[13 Apr 25 21:54 UTC] No.43676140[source]▶
Python is like Algol in terms of syntax, certainly, and in fact is almost an ideal Algol syntactically: It has no (or few) block delimiter characters or keywords, but imposes proper indentation as a syntactic requirement.