“[About Algol 60] Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their language and enabled me to describe my invention [Quicksort] so elegantly to the world.”

—  C. A. R. Hoare

The Emperor's Old Clothes

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C. A. R. Hoare photo
C. A. R. Hoare 16
British computer scientist 1934

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“[About Algol 60] Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.”

C. A. R. Hoare (1934) British computer scientist

Hints on Programming Language Design http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/73/403/CS-TR-73-403.pdf, December 1973.

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“[About Algol W] It was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL […] I was astonished when the working group, consisting of all the best known international experts of programming languages, resolved to lay aside the commissioned draft on which we had all been working and swallow a line with such an unattractive bait.”

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“[About Algol 68] The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "… as a tool for the reliable creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure."”

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“In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they'll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion.”

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“We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data-processing situations the capability for describing data.”

Grace Hopper (1906–1992) American computer scientist and United States Navy officer

As quoted in Management and the Computer of the Future (1962) by Sloan School of Management, p. 273
Context: We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data-processing situations the capability for describing data. We must also include a mechanism for determining the priorities to be applied to the data. These priorities are not fixed and are indicated in many cases by the data.
Thus we must have a language and a structure that will take care of the data descriptions and priorities, as well as the operations we wish to perform. If we think seriously about these problems, we find that we cannot work with procedures alone, since they are sequential. We need to define the problem instead of the procedures. The Language Structures Group of the Codasyl Committee has been studying the structure of languages that can be used to describe data-processing problems. The Group started out by trying to design a language for stating procedures, but soon discovered that what was really required was a description of the data and a statement of the relationships between the data sets. The Group has since begun writing an algebra of processes, the background for a theory of data processing.
Clearly, we must break away from the sequential and not limit the computers. We must state definitions and provide for priorities and descriptions of data. We must state relationships, not procedures.

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