Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!nott-cs!anw
From: anw@nott-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol-68 down for the count
Message-ID: <593@tuck.nott-cs.UUCP>
Date: 28 Nov 88 15:44:46 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <591@tuck.nott-cs.UUCP> <404@ubbpc.UUCP>
Reply-To: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Organization: Department of Mathematics, The University, NOTTINGHAM, NG7 2RD, UK.
Lines: 53

In article <404@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:
  [ignores all the arguments, reasons, facts and opinions in my previous
   article, and tries to wriggle out with ...]

> Andy, I now know of 2 (two) institutions that ever tried to use Algol-68 at
>all seriously, yours, and Math. Centrum in Amsterdam.

	Well, if your mail and news directories have been as full as mine,
you now know of a few more;  I could (fairly) easily run up another hundred
or so, based on published papers, attendance at conferences, personal
contacts, etc.

> If that is not an embarrassing debacle for a language design, what, pray tell,
							^^^^^^
	This is shifting the ground somewhat, but let that pass ...

>is?  Ten million computer owners elected not to use Algol-68, and (order of
>magnitude) 2 institutions chose to use it.

	We now all know that 2 is not the right OOM.  It should be pointed
out that nor is 10000000.  We're talking about the early 70's, when computers
were mainframes, rare, hideously expensive, and located in computing centres
with large staffs.  [I realise that *some* places are *still* like that!]
Ordinary users didn't get much chance to "elect" whether or not to use any
particular language;  they were stuck with what their CC provided.

> I submit that the reason an utterly negligible fraction of the computer
>owners in the world use Algol-68 is that the language design was inherently
>flawed, and it is my interpretation that these flaws stemmed from the
>committee-design process (primarily).

	I suggest you point to such a flaw, and then we can perhaps discuss
it sensibly.

> The primary "benefit" that I see in your institutions' choice of Algol-68 is
>that you write programs that nobody else can use, and that your students have
>to do extra work learning mainstream languages after they graduate.

	This worried us at the time.  We talked to many prospective employers
of our graduates.  *Without exception* they said:  "Teach what you like.  We
will teach them Fortran or Cobol or whatever.  They will have to adapt to
our coding standards, hardware, operating system, etc, etc;  they might just
as well adapt to our software as well.  Please send us graduates who are
computer literate, and who know how to think."  Would the Unisys UNIX
Portation Center's advice have been different?

	No ex-student has ever returned to complain about the time "wasted"
learning Algol 68;  many have said how much they appreciated Algol once they
had been forced to learn "inferior" languages.

-- 
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk