In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community.
FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust (architectures unsupported by Rust lose support).
As a fan of Algol 68, I'm pretty excited for this.
For people who aren't familiar with the language, pretty much all modern languages are descended from Algol 60 or Algol 68. C descends from Algol 60, so pretty much every popular modern language derives from Algol in some way [1].
Yes, massively influential, but was it ever used or popular?, I always think of it as sort of the poster child for the danger of "design by committee".
Sure it's ideas spawned many of today's languages, But wasn't that because at the time nobody could afford to actually implement the spec. So we ended up with a ton of "algols buts" (like algol but can actually be implemented and runs on real hardware).
If PL/I was like a C++ of the time, Algol-68 was probably comparable to a Scala of the time. A number of mind-boggling ideas (for the time), complexity, an array of kitchen sinks.
It certainly has quite a reputation, but I suspect it has more to do with dense formalism that was quite unlike everything else. The language itself is actually surprisingly nice for its time, very orthogonal and composable.
Personally, I think the whole C tangent was a misstep and would love to see Algo 68 turn into Algo 26 or 27. I sort of like C and C++ and many other languages which came, but they have issues. I think Algo 68 could develop into something better than C++, it has some of the pieces already in place.
Admittedly, every language I really enjoy and get along with is one of those languages that produced little compared to the likes of C (APL, Tcl/Tk, Forth), and as a hobbyist I have no real stake in the game.
Whilst I think that C has its place, my personal choice of Algol 26 or 27 would be CLU – a highly influential, yet little known and underrated Algol inspired language. CLU is also very approachable and pretty compact.
I've actually been toying with writing an Algol 68 compiler myself for a while.
While I doubt I'll do any major development in it, I'll definitely have a play with it, just to revisit old memories and remind myself of its many innovations.
Until a few years ago, gccgo was well maintained and trailed the main Go compiler by 1 or 2 releases, depending on how the release schedules aligned. Having a second compiler was considered an important feature. Currently, the latest supported Go version is 1.18, but without Generics support. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but porting Generics to gccgo may have been a hurdle that broke the cadence.
Seems doubtful, given that generics and the gccgo compiler were both spearheaded by Ian Lance Taylor, it seems more likely to me that him leaving google would be a more likely suspect, but I don't track go.
Without knowing what your interests/motivations and backgrounds are, it is hard to make good recommendations, but if you didn't know about rosettacode or github I figured I should start with that
FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust (architectures unsupported by Rust lose support).
For people who aren't familiar with the language, pretty much all modern languages are descended from Algol 60 or Algol 68. C descends from Algol 60, so pretty much every popular modern language derives from Algol in some way [1].
[1] https://ballingt.com/assets/prog_lang_poster.png
Sure it's ideas spawned many of today's languages, But wasn't that because at the time nobody could afford to actually implement the spec. So we ended up with a ton of "algols buts" (like algol but can actually be implemented and runs on real hardware).
Aside from historical interest, why are you excited for it?
Admittedly, every language I really enjoy and get along with is one of those languages that produced little compared to the likes of C (APL, Tcl/Tk, Forth), and as a hobbyist I have no real stake in the game.
While I doubt I'll do any major development in it, I'll definitely have a play with it, just to revisit old memories and remind myself of its many innovations.
https://github.com/search?q=algol68&type=repositories
Without knowing what your interests/motivations and backgrounds are, it is hard to make good recommendations, but if you didn't know about rosettacode or github I figured I should start with that