Mark Dominus“There are doubtless some readers who are convinced that abolition of go to statements is merely a fad.”
(Donald E. Knuth, “Structured Programming with ‘go to’ Statements”, 1974.)
“At the present time I think we are on the verge of discovering at last what programming languages should really be like.”
Oh, Donald.
“My dream is that by 1984 we will see a consensus developing for a really good programming language (or, more likely, a coherent family of languages).”
I can't even.
Colin Rowat@mjd a naïve question: what were the main reasons he was wrong? My naïve guess: as computers became more powerful, compilers became more capable, allowing higher layers of abstraction in programming languages?
@rowat_c I'm not sure what you mean, I don't think there needs to be a reason why an unlikely prediction fails to come true.
I'd be more interested in knowing why Knuth thought it seemed likely in the first place.
Pozorvlak@mjd @rowat_c my guess is that ten years felt like a long way away, and the language scene felt like it was coalescing? At the time there were Algol derivatives, Lisp derivatives, APL derivatives, and a couple of oddballs like Prolog and Snobol. SML was created in 1983, Perl in 1987. Smalltalk existed but wasn't released outside PARC until 1980.
@pozorvlak @mjd thanks. I really am naïve here, though: what allowed new paradigms like OOP that Knuth missed?