He has some good points. This one is from a different paper (Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass):<p><i>Designers had ignored both the issue of efficiency and that a language serves the human reader, not just the automatic parser. If a language poses difficulties to parsers, it surely also poses difficulties for the human reader. Many languages would be clearer and cleaner had their designers been forced to use a simple parsing method</i>.
Who are Wirths, Dijkstras, Hoares, McCarthies and Keys of today? I mean - who represents current generation of such thinkers? Genuinely asking. Most stuff I see here and in other places is about blogposts, videos and rants made by contemporary "dev influencers" and bloggers (some of them very skilled and capable of course, very often more than I am), but I would like to be in touch with something more thoughtful and challenging.
I saw on page 25 (the third PDF page) a nice argument against variable shadowing. I can think of a couple of modern languages I wish had learned this ;)
I think the legend goes Wirth created the Pascal language to be the most easily compilable. To show my age, I recall a class used Modula-2 when I was in college, also from Wirth, very Pascal-like.
Nowadays you can enjoy it on GCC, as it is now an officially supported frontend, after GNU Modula-2 got merged into it.<p><a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.2.0/gm2" rel="nofollow">https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.2.0/gm2</a><p>Even available on compiler explorer to play with, <a href="https://godbolt.org/z/ev9Pbxn9K" rel="nofollow">https://godbolt.org/z/ev9Pbxn9K</a><p>Yes, that was a common trend across all programming languages designed by him.<p>That is also how P-Code came to be, he didn't want to create a VM for Pascal, rather the goal was to make porting easier, by requiring only a basic P-Code interpreter, it was very easy to port Pascal, a design approach he kept for Modula-2 (M-Code) and Oberon (Slim binaries).
> most easily compilable<p>I think it was more that it would be easy to write a compiler for, which meant that CS students could write one. Don't have a source for this that I can remember, though.
Looks like AI slop to me :)