Re: language design after Algol 60, was Add nested-function support

Martin,


> On 08/04/18 14:21, Derek M. Jones wrote:
>>> Modern popular languages are neither powerful nor easy to learn.
>>
>> What evidence do you have for this?
>
> The C standard is over 700 pages: not exactly an easy read.


By evidence I mean an evaluation of multiple languages.


Here are some languages from 1957. Were they powerful and easy
to learn?


http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2017/05/21/evidence-for-28-possible-compilers-in-1957/


....> memorise and avoid using if they want to write conformant and
> compatible code.


I thought we were talking about powerful and easy to learn?


> On the other hand, the Revised^4 Report on the Algorithmic Language
> Scheme ("Dedicated to the Memory of ALGOL 60") is only a 55 page manual
> but it includes the full syntax and semantics of the language.


My question was about powerful and easy to learn. Not about number
of pages in the language specification.
[In my experience, any language that is semantically similar to
languages you already know is easy to learn. For example, I find
python comprehensions obvious and easy to use because they're just a
syntax for a function mapping. I know other python programmers who
find them baffling and always write "for" loops instead, presumably
because the languages they'd used didn't do much function mapping.
-John]

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