🚀 go-pugleaf

Algol68 was/is one of the most elegant and useful languages I ever worked
with. It was the first language where in my personal experience non-trivial
programs occationally ran correctly first time they compiled after a major
change - this is an effect that I (successfully) tried to achieve for C++.

So why didn't Algol68 succeed on a LARGE scale. Naturally, there are many
reasons, but here is a few I think were important:

	- Algol68 was a decade in the making before implementations were
	beginning to appear - and for many (most?) machines implementations
	has yet to become widely available. By the time they appeared the
	initial excitement about the Algol68 concepts had died and early
	fans become disillusioned and moved on to other languages.

	- Algol68 developed a terminology and a style of language definition
	that was clean and surperior to any alternatives I have seen. This
	made it unapproachable to the casual user. The very elegance of the
	terminology and style of presentation was a major barrier. I was
	lucky enough to get my hands on a concise (about 150 page) and very
	readable description - and a good implementation - otherwise I would
	have had to dismiss Algol68 as a practical tool and have left it as
	a ``probably interesting intellectual challenge'' that I would never
	have had time to look into.

	- By the time Algol68 was complete and beginning to become available
	the issues of encapsulation and modularity had come to dominate
	many people's concerns. Algol68 did not emphasize that - and the
	textbooks I saw and (with notable exceptions) the Algol68 programmers
	I talked to completely ignored that and concentrated on explaining
	how Algol68 was a better Algol or a better Fortran. Thus, by the
	time one could use Algol68, it was seen as an oldfashioned language -
	the final close-to-perfect development of a dead branch of evolution.

	- Algol68 was seen as European and Academic. Either could in itself -
	at the time - kill a language in the parts of US industry that set the
	tone for what tools programmers actually use.

	- Algol68 had a main-frame bias at a time where first mini-computers
	and then micros emerged as the major growth areas for programmers.

I think Algol68 was and is a most attractive language. Had there been a K&R
for Algol68 and a cheap and easily portable implementation of Algol68 available
for a PDP11 in 1975 or so it would have swept the world covering the areas
where Pascal and C thrived. However, there wasn't such a book and there wasn't
such an implementation - and it is doubtful if there could have been. The
culture that produced Algol68 (in my impression) simply didn't think that way.