[skrebbel]

He wrote this in 1975, dissing most of the popular programming languages of the time. Does anyone know which language Dijkstra didn't think was a mess? (and please don't say GCL, his own unrunnable toy language)

I mean, if FORTRAN is a mess, then isn't ALGOL too? Is anyone here old enough to remember?

[Joker_vD]

Well, Dijkstra together with Zonneveld wrote the first ever implementation of ALGOL 60, and, in fact, heavy-handed the recursive procedure calls into the language. If not for him, who knows, Quicksort may have not been invented for another decade or so.

ALGOL 68, on the other hand... "The more I see of it, the more unhappy I become." [0]

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/E...

[AnimalMuppet]

If I understand correctly, ALGOL had better ways of structuring code into functions than FORTRAN did. This let ALGOL do what eventually was called "structured programming", and FORTRAN do what was called "plate of spaghetti" programming.

This is not the same as saying that EWD thought that ALGOL was good...

[User23]

I imagine he had at least some fondness for Algol 60 since he is co-credited with writing the first compiler for it.

[AnimalMuppet]

That might give you fondness. Or disgust. In his case, I have no data about which one won.

[jolux]

Algol is quite different from Fortran.

[skrebbel]

Sure, so is COBOL. That wasn't my question.

[jolux]

Well, I believe the answer to your question is the edition of Algol he worked on. I personally think it’s one of the most elegant imperative language designs in history.