Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!rutgers!gatech!mcnc!decvax!decwrl!labrea!agate!saturn!ucscc.UCSC.EDU!haynes
From: haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (99700000)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol-68 down for the count (was: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?)
Message-ID: <5581@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 88 06:48:13 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <591@tuck.nott-cs.UUCP> <404@ubbpc.UUCP> <41111@ccicpg.UUCP> <1975@garth.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@saturn.ucsc.edu
Reply-To: haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes)
Organization: California State Home for the Weird
Lines: 36

When I needed to learn Fortran they handed me a copy of Dan McCracken's
introductory book on Fortran programming and I was writing usable
programs in a day or so.

When Dartmouth BASIC became available they handed me a thin pamphlet
and I was writing usable programs a few minutes later.

When Algol 60 became available and I wanted to learn it they handed me
a description of the language written in BNF.  Or maybe it was a copy
of the CACM article.  It was quite a while before I got an Algol
program to compile successfully, much less do anything useful in my
work.

When Algol 68 was defined (by then I was using PL/1 a lot) all I could get
was a book ten times as incomprehensible as the Algol 60 report.  And it
was several years later before somebody might have had a compiler
that I could have used; I didn't bother trying to find out.

Many of us want to get our work done, not to learn a language for its
own sake. ("An engineer is someone who does list processing in Fortran",
V. Michael Powers, Naval Postgraduate School)  Extrapolating from my
own experience, I'd say the popularity of a language, notwithstanding
its intrinsic merit, depends on
a.  a good book for self-study, with lots of examples
b.  access to a compiler for the language
c.  classroom instruction is a very distant third
d.  amount of effort required to get a program started.  (When I started
learning Cobol one of the first programs I wrote was a program to
prefabricate as much as possible of the "boiler plate" needed to write
a Cobol program.)
haynes@ucscc.ucsc.edu
haynes@ucscc.bitnet
..ucbvax!ucscc!haynes

"Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an Art."
        Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle