HN

Comments (27)

• carlos256
  He has some good points. This one is from a different paper (Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass):Designers had ignored both the issue of efficiency and that a language serves the human reader, not just the automatic parser. If a language poses difficulties to parsers, it surely also poses difficulties for the human reader. Many languages would be clearer and cleaner had their designers been forced to use a simple parsing method.
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  wolvesechoes
  Who are Wirths, Dijkstras, Hoares, McCarthies and Keys of today? I mean - who represents current generation of such thinkers? Genuinely asking. Most stuff I see here and in other places is about blogposts, videos and rants made by contemporary "dev influencers" and bloggers (some of them very skilled and capable of course, very often more than I am), but I would like to be in touch with something more thoughtful and challenging.
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  notarobot123
  The key, then, lies not so much in minimising the number of basic features of a language, but rather in keeping the included facilities simple to understand in all their consequences of usage and free from unexpected interactions when they are combined. A form must be found for these facilities which is convenient to remember and intuitively clear to a programmer, and which acts as a natural guidance in the formulation of [their] ideas.We've successfully found some strong patterns for structuring programs that transform data in various ways for the kinds of programs Wirth was imagining. The best patterns have proven themselves by being replicated across languages (for example discriminated unions and pattern matching) and the worst have died away (things like goto and classical inheritance).There's still work to do to find better languages though. A language is good if it fits the shape of the problem and, while we've found some good patterns for some shapes of problems, there are a lot more problems without good patterns.I had hoped there'd be more languages for everyday end-user problems by now. At the start of the SaaS era it seemed like a lot of services were specific solutions that might fit into a more general modelling language. That hasn't happened yet but maybe a programming language at just the right level of abstraction could make that possible.
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  augustk
  It's also worth noting that statements like for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++) { S; if (P) { break; } } are just as bad since `break' (and `continue' and early `return') are a just gotos in disguise.
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  palad1n
  I think the legend goes Wirth created the Pascal language to be the most easily compilable. To show my age, I recall a class used Modula-2 when I was in college, also from Wirth, very Pascal-like.
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  vintagedave
  I saw on page 25 (the third PDF page) a nice argument against variable shadowing. I can think of a couple of modern languages I wish had learned this ;)
• rramadass
  Related must-read is Wirth's Turing Award Lecture; From Programming Language Design to Computer Construction (pdf) - http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/wirth/TuringAward.pdf
• medi8r
  Looks like AI slop to me :)