One of the reasons I was so interesting to find this thing I had written was that things had (in some ways) changed so little in thirty years.

Today I was re-reading Donald Knuth's 1974 paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” where he says:

“At the present time I think we are on the verge of discovering at last what program- ming languages should really be like. … My dream is that by 1984 we will see a consensus developing for a really good programming language (or, more likely, a coherent family of languages).”

Hoo boy, was he ever wrong.