Go and Brand X: A language comparison

It's an oddly syntax-focused comparison given that we already often refer to that entire class of languages as 'Algol-style' or 'Algol-derived' and the block-structure and lexical scope ideas are in wide use even in languages far afield, syntactically. I think the notion that they 'overlap more than they differ' is quite inaccurate - they do, if you cherry pick features, gloss over others (par is not the same as goroutines, interfaces are nothing like 'polymorphic operators', you can't turn all of go's keywords into, say, Turkish). If you weigh the differences, conservatively and pragmatically, the languages are tremendously different.<p>The other points raised:<p>'effective' vs 'good' - seems like a narrower case of the plentiful and in-depth literature available about 'worse is better' (and the converse).<p>'can't spot any language feature that was invented after about 1985' - at this point the Lisp crowd should probably be reaching for their pitchforks and lighting their torches. Perhaps formalized systems for hygienic macros came a bit later?

Excellent article. It pleases me that an important language that turned out not to be very widely used is nevertheless remembered by some -- if not by the creators of Go, who were apparently doomed to reinvent Algol 68 badly.<p>I'm also reminded of C.A.R. Hoare's famous quip about Algol <i>60</i>: "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." (Sourced at <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._A._R._Hoare" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._A._R._Hoare</a> .)

The author admits that one feature present in Go and missing from Algol-68 is proper closures. I would consider this an extremely significant deficit in Algol-68, not just one item to bury in a laundry-list comparison.

In my own personal opinion, the fact that Google have brought to the forefront the need for a new systems language is way more important than the exact feature set they have chosen to include. Even things like garbage collection and array bounds checking make life better.<p>One thing I find interesting is that I've seen several people claim that Go is all but useless until they implement generics. Java has only had generics for the last 5 years, C# had them after that, and the languages Go is intended to compete with still don't have them (well C++ has templates and I guess C has void *)!

I hate to break it to the author, but programming language design in general hasn't evolved much since ALGOL. It's not just Go. Sure, we have object-oriented programming, but that's really not anything earth-shattering from a language design standpoint.

See also:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941350" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941350</a>

I find it hard to make any "system" language that will be better than C or maybe C++. Go or Algol are just going to be C with some features tacked on. If someone is going to overtake C it will need to be a whole new approach. I think that is what the author is trying to get at.

Wow, the Algol-68 spec really is impenetrable.

Hard to invent anything new.