How did it happen that Algol 60 was an improvement on its successors?

Question

The original statement referred to by this question is:

The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques which put them into practice, the more is my amazement and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

(From the appendix of a very readable report on programming language design by C. A. R. Hoare. I read that report because I wanted to ask this question, not the other way round. Reading that report made it clear to me that the original statement is even more true than I thought when I decided to ask this question.)

The intention of this question is to better understand the sociological and political aspects of the events, not the detailed technical merits. The politically accepted successors of Algol 60 (at the time) like Algol 68, PL/I or Ada were badly feature bloated, while really improved successors like Algol W or Simula were never widely used. The surviving members of the Algol language family seem to prefer naming Pascal as their great-grandfather instead of Algol, even so Pascal seems to be just another descendant of Algol. (C or Smalltalk are not descendants of Algol, because their syntax and underlying principles are too different. C++ on the other hand might be considered as a legitimate descendant of Simula, embodying many of the same underlying principles, adopting the C syntax and legacy only for political reasons to avoid the fate of the Algol like languages.)

An account of the history of types in programming languages made me realize that even the type system of Algol 60 was still quite unfinished. It seems that it would have been easy to just finish the type system and fix some other minor annoying details for the next revision of the language. But instead... ??? Most of my math books use Algol for their pseudocode, and it looks much nicer than the C pseudocode in the few books that don't use Algol. So I always wondered why Algol actually died.

Answer 1

I always felt like the reason is expressed by Alan Kay in his OOPSLA 1997 keynote, when he talks about Dijkstra's paper. I am not taking sides here but the tension expressed there seems to be prevalent in politics of CS, when it comes to Europe vs America. Algol represents European way of doing CS, and really most of the code was written in America. So no one really wrote any big system in Algol, thus it died.

But, I am an outsider to both cultures so, take this with a huge grain of salt. Also I know that Algol 60 designers included American computer scientists as well. All in all, this is just how I feel about it, no strong arguments here.

Answer 2

I remember a mathematician in the nineteen sixties said to me that the ALGOL60 Report could be read and understood in the time of consuming a couple of cups of coffee in an afternoon. But look at the ALGOL68 Report and the latest version of the ISO PL/I standard! What a big difference! To program well in practice, one should be able to competently consult these official documents in cases of need. I am quite sure that even today the majority of those having studied CS in the universities wouldn't find the said two documents an easy reading. On the other hand, at least decades ago, a large number of programmers in practice aren't CS graduates.

Answer 3

It is probably hard to accurately answer a question about history, especially without access to the proper sources. Not sure whether this answer is primarily opinion based, or rather just guesswork.

This article about the history of Algol contains some interesting information, that the Algol committee was unable to form a consensus, and ended with a minority report and the adoption of Algol 68 basically accepting the proposal by Adriaan van Wijngaarden.

However, the Dutch wikipedia article on Adriaan van Wijngaarden says

Hij stond tevens aan het hoofd van de werkgroep die de programmeertaal Algol-68 ontwikkelde.

and the German wikipedia article on Adriaan van Wijngaarden says

Durch seine Arbeit als Leiter des ALGOL-68-Komitees leistete van Wijngaarden einen profunden, wenngleich erst spät beachteten, Beitrag zum Gebiet des Entwurfs, der Definition und der Beschreibung von Programmiersprachen.

So both article claim that he was actually the head of the working group that developed the programming language Algol-68. This puts the fact that the committee was unable to form a consensus, and that it adopted the language that he proposed into a more dubious light.