[vincent-manis]

I was present at the IFIP 1978 conference in Toronto where Dijkstra announced that personal computing was a dead end because most people don't know how to program.

There's an irony about the design of ALGOL 68. It was denounced at the time as being too big a language, with too many experimental features. In fact, the language in the Report is unimplementable, primarily because the lexical syntax is fanciful (there's an actual difference between the roman period and the italic period) and also abstract (so no two implementations actually have the same lexical syntax). I was on the periphery of an ALGOL 68 implementation project that foundered because the goal was to implement every conceivable edge case, include those that could never occur in practice, e.g., x[i] := x[...50 pages of code...] Yet very reasonable subsets (including ALGOL-68R and FLACC) were built. As for the language breadth, arguably C# is much broader, and I haven't heard anyone claim that it is a failure.

As for the Report...there was a time when I understood it cover to cover. But Lindsey and van der Meulen's Informal Introduction presented the whole language at a level understandable to anyone who understood ALGOL 60. van Wijngaarden did the language a terrible disservice when he forced (that is the correct word, I believe) the use of two-level grammars in order to ensure type correctness. Had the Report never existed, the language would have had much more traction.

The irony? Apart from the grossly-overengineered “transput” library—much better adapted to a unit-record and line printer world than our modern world—the one actual experimental feature in the language was the par clause, which provided parallel execution, and relied on semaphores for synchronization. Dijkstra's semaphores.