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Comment by will_work4tears | Hacker News Reader

Yep, same here. It looks pretty JavaScript-y, which is familiar at least. I think this is a good move on Apple's part.

It's probably a wise decision to have an "Algol patterned" language. No non Algol patterned language has ever become a mainstream programming language to my knowledge.

I am not a programming language wonk; so I imagine most languages I am familiar-with/know-of are necessarily Algol patterned. What are some non-Algol patterned languages?

Lisp, Forth, Prolog (and Erlang), Smalltalk, Haskell, and Tcl all come to mind.

In particular, Obj-C = Smalltalk + C. If you subtract C from Obj-C, you'd most easily just end up with Smalltalk. But that's not the right move for mass adoption.

I agree with the first, but disagree with the second part:

COBOL, Fortran, JCL (not Turing complete, AFAIK), SQL, Excel, DOS batch files all were (fairly) mainstream at some time.

Fortran came before Algol and arguably influenced it[1]. I agree with COBOL and SQL in particular, though.

[1] http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/Computer...

The correctness of that image can be discussed. Fortran was specified in 1954, but the first compiler shipped in April 1957 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#History). That is earlier than Algol 58 (first two implementations in 1958 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_58#Time_line_of_implement...), but close.

More importantly, "inspired by" does not imply that Fortran 58 is Algol-like (that same picture would declare Fortran Lisp-like, too)

For me, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Simple_FORTRAN_II_progr... certainly is nothing like Algol.

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