[munificent]

Yes. I love this book. At a practical level, it's pretty (very) outdated. It talks about things like sorting when your data is stored on tape.

But it's just a beautiful, succinct book. If you get tired of how messy, fast-moving, and chaotic a lot of software development can be, it's a delightful respite. It cleanses and orders the mind.

[vanderZwan]

From what I have read about Wirth his way of thinking is the computer science equivalent of Bauhaus minimalism. Which oddly enough doesn't appeal to me in the design of everyday things all that much (I can definitely respect it though), but feels very fitting for computer science.

[tempguy9999]

Wirth's minimalism is, IMO, driven by some semi- or full understanding of formal semantics, wherein simplicity is essential to correctness in implementation of the language (as the language designer), and essential to the correct use of the language (as a programmer). This is my opinion formed from what I read so beware.

C.A.R. Hoare has excellent stuff to say on this and hardware design - here's his 1982 turing award lecture https://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1283936&type=pdf and it's well worth reading (quite short).

Extracts:

" [...]in May 1965, Niklaus Wirth was com- missioned to collate them into a single language design [the successor to algol 60]. I was delighted by his draft design which avoided all the known defects of ALGOL 60 and included several new features, all of which could be simply and efficiently implemented, and safely and conveniently used.

The description of the language was not yet complete. I worked hard on making suggestions for its improve- ment and so did many other members of our group. By the time of the next meeting in St. Pierre de Chartreuse, France in October 1965, we had a draft of an excellent and realistic language design which was published in June 1966 as "A Contribution to the Development of ALGOL", in the Communications of the A CM. It was implemented on the IBM 360 and given the title ALGOL W by its many happy users. It was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL."

But people wanted as much as possible in so instead...

"Three months came and went--not a word of the new draft appeared. After six months, in October 1966, the ALGOL working group met in Warsaw. It had before it an even longer and thicker document, full of errors corrected at the last minute, describing equally obscurely yet another different, and to me, equally unattractive language. The experts in the group could not see the defects of the design and they firmly resolved to adopt the draft, believing it would be completed in three months. In vain, I told them it would not. In vain, I urged them to remove some of the technical mistakes of the language, the predominance of references, the default type conversions. Far from wishing to simplify the lan- guage, the working group actually asked the authors to include even more complex features like overloading of operators and concurrency."

[...]

"At last, in December 1968, in a mood of black depression, I attended the meeting in Munich at which our long-gestated monster was to come to birth and receive the name ALGOL 68." [Edit: added this para]

I think Wirth (or Hoare?) said algol 60 was an improvement algol 68. [Sentence edited]

He then goes on to describe the creation of PL/1 which is an even worse experience.

Anyway, the whole paper's well worth reading. It has a lot of good stuff and is only 9 sides long.

[vanderZwan]

Thank you for both that comment and that link!