Comment by 👽 TKurtBond
Re: "wirth on language design by commitee"
There are many advantages to Wirth's languages (simplicity being one of the most important), but also some disadvantages. In particular, they are often under specified, resulting in ambiguities.
However, I'll note that Ada was not designed by committee: Ada was designed by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah. That team did look at a lot of feedback once the first version of Ada was released in the run up to the final version enshrined as the Ada 83 standard.
It is, however, MAINTAINED by a committee.
There are a lot of things I like about Wirth's languages. There are a lot of things I like about Ada. Unfortunately, some of them are contradictory. Ah well. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I think Ada is a member of the Wirth lineage of languages, though a distant relative.
I'm glad we have all of Wirth's languages, and I'm glad we have Ada.
2025-10-09 · 7 months ago
Original Post
wirth on language design by commitee — in that paper wirth tells the story of how he was a member of a committee that was working on the dosign of algol 68. he came up with suggestions that were rejected. therefore he decided to not only define his own algol dialect (algol-w) but also to implement a compiler for it. the quote is: Essentially, Algol W had extended Algol 60 with new data types representing double precision floating-point and complex numbers, with bit strings and with dynamic...