There's a lot of hearsay in that articles, and a lot of sentiment rooted in the particulars of that time.
Sure, it was a complex thing in the late 60s/early 70s. Sure, Wirth came up with something simpler. But I'm missing a deeper analysis, especially with a more modern view point where basically any language is at least as complex as Algol 68[0].
> Arguably Wirth’s Algol-W was a better successor to Algol-60
I might not even disagree, but what were the arguments, and how are they holding up?
> and arguably did not have the same connections to industry as the likes of Fortran and Cobol
Sure. But neither did Algol-W or Pascal. And pretty much anything else in the 20th century.