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

And C++. While it does have slightly better types than C, I can still apply functions that the compiler doesn't even warn me about and that crash my program at runtime. If I'm lucky. When the phase of the Moon is adversarial, my program continues running in a corrupt state.

Not only Niklaus Wirth,

Here is C.A.R Hoare's on his "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture", guess to what programming language he is indirectly making a point of, regarding 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson.

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

Via dang's recap (... - Current Status -):

"People who are still trying to refer to the article are unaware of the capabilities of current Pascal (Delphi/FPC) implementations."

https://wiki.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Pr...

Interesting paper, thanks. The findings concerning C seem reasonable. I would add the very weak type checker and the silly syntax, of which the majority of people only use a fraction (many C constructs are surprising and not generally known) to the issue of the small Hamming distance from one valid syntax construct to another, not intended one. Though I doubt that (Common) Lisp is a valid alternative for the typical C use cases.

It feels like you're mixing together a lot of ideas that don't really fit together very well. In terms of syntax, only four of the languages you describe as "more or less the same" in terms of how they look use "type before identifier" like you mention. On the other hand, four of them use the ML-style syntax of identifier-colon-type, one uses identifier before type with no colon, and the final one doesn't even have type annotations. At least four of them don't require semicolons either, and I'd argue that at least in Go, having semicolons at all would probably strike people as odd. You've also left out Python, which doesn't fit any of those syntax descriptions you gave and more popular than at least half of the ones you did include.

The timeline of 70s and 80s also doesn't really seem to fit with what you're saying either. Of the languages you mention either as "more or less the same" or "refreshingly new", the ones from either the 70s or 80s are C, C++, ML, Smalltalk, Pascal, and Smalltalk; all of the other "refreshingly new" ones are from either before or after those years. Common Lisp was from the 80s, but the syntax originated with LISP in the 50s, so if you're going to go with the most common variant, I'd argue you should also remove ML from the list and replace it with OCaml, which is from the 90s.

Even more significantly, it feels like you're comparing apples and oranges with the discussion of syntax at the beginning and then talking about bringing something new to the PL design space after. I'd guess that most people involved in PL design find syntax to be the least interesting aspect of it, and I think it's hard to argue that none of the languages you described as looking similar brought anything new to the PL design space.

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.

While I started with Basic and and Turbo Pascal, I started to appreciate a lot the curly braces and semicolons because it makes a lot of sense for me (*). Therefore I see the convergence as a good thing, keeping the best parts of everything and improving with good parts from others.

* As opposed to BEGIN-END in SQL, indenting in Python or weirdness of Cobol in the 90s.

>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

The upside being that if you come from C or Java you will fill at home with Go.

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.

This is not a very accurate summary of said article. In fact it is inaccurate enough to call it lying.

Null-terminated strings is an endless source of bugs in C progras. I with C used fixed size strings (may be with varint instead of 8-bit length field) or Pascal got more tratcion.

One that you are missing (and a pretty painful one, for that matter) is "lack of flexible array parameters".

Also, the problem with pascal string was the length being limited to 255 characters, which wasn't enough even at the time.

Have you ever used a Pascal compiler that's strict about this? It's surprisingly annoying even today. Now imagine it's 1981 and you're editing your programs with a line editor. In C code, you can freely swap lines around. If you try the same in Pascal code, you'll spend a lot of time fixing up semicolons.