[Info-vax] [OT] Wirth style languages, was: Re: Obscure Ada compiler vendors?

[Craig A. Berry]

In article <kjjpnn$6ff$2 at dont-email.me>,
 Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:

> On 2013-04-03, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:

> > If you're working on a large application or an operating system, you're 
> > going to be looking at immediate and long-term staff availability and 
> > retention and staffing costs, at the trend and the likelihood the 
> > language will be common in ten years or whatever horizon you've 
> > established, and at whether the language is reasonably suited for the 
> > task.  For system programming work, C or subset C++ is still a very 
> > common choice.
> >
> 
> Even if C style languages are dominant in the workplace, then exposing
> students to Wirth style languages in university will still give them a
> more rounded background.

As Hoff already said, Python is the usual choice for beginning computer 
science students.  I don't know whether you would consider it 
"Wirth-style," whatever that means, but people who like it generally 
consider it simple, elegant, and safe.

More advanced computer science courses are likely to emphasize the 
functional languages Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, etc.  Simplicity, 
safety, and concurrency are major emphases of these languages.

If one were to rewrite VMS from scratch (which I still think is a crazy 
idea as long as there is any possibility of maintaining the existing 
code base), some combination of Haskell and C or Go would probably be 
the current equivalents of BLISS and MACRO.