[HN Gopher] Algol-68 seemed like a good idea - until it wasn't
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       Algol-68 seemed like a good idea - until it wasn't
        
       Author : Bostonian
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2024-11-08 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (craftofcoding.wordpress.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (craftofcoding.wordpress.com)
        
       | jandrese wrote:
       | It sounds like a classic case of the Second System effect. Where
       | the original product was functional but a maybe little too basic,
       | so everybody has an idea of how to improve it. Many of the ideas
       | are good on their own, but the committee ends up accepting far
       | too many and the thing suffers from terminal feature creep.
        
         | kazinator wrote:
         | Feature creep and Second System effect are all the rage now.
         | Every recent language has them.
         | 
         | If you don't constantly have three dozen Requests for
         | Implementation brewing, seven of which are going into the next
         | release, you're a dead project.
        
           | dboreham wrote:
           | Emergent property of humans, it turns out.
        
           | setopt wrote:
           | Perhaps we should make a language with a hard cap on the
           | number of "features" in the language syntax + standard
           | library. For everything you propose to add, you would then
           | also need to propose something to remove.
        
       | mhd wrote:
       | There's a lot of hearsay in that articles, and a lot of sentiment
       | rooted in the particulars of that time.
       | 
       | Sure, it was a complex thing in the late 60s/early 70s. Sure,
       | Wirth came up with something simpler. But I'm missing a deeper
       | analysis, especially with a more modern view point where
       | basically _any_ language is _at least_ as complex as Algol 68[0].
       | 
       | > Arguably Wirth's Algol-W was a better successor to Algol-60
       | 
       | I might not even disagree, but what were the arguments, and how
       | are they holding up?
       | 
       | > and arguably did not have the same connections to industry as
       | the likes of Fortran and Cobol
       | 
       | Sure. But neither did Algol-W or Pascal. And pretty much anything
       | else in the 20th century.
       | 
       | [0]: http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/
        
       | zgs wrote:
       | Algol 68 was to Algol as C++ is to C: trying to do too much
       | resulting in over-complexity.
       | 
       | The two page spread showing a graph of the implicit type
       | conversions was a masterpiece.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-08 23:00 UTC)