[jafo1989]

Niklaus Wirth could afford to be simple, he lived in simpler times where demand was much lower than today, being chased by much less investment.

Change was measured in years, compute and storage options were limited. I wonder how many of his OSes / programming languages spanned multiple heterogeneous compute architectures.

Don't get me wrong, love the guy...but wonder what kind of impact he would have if in his prime today...

[cade-117]

Don't need to "wonder". Just use a Wirthian-inspired language and see where it takes you.

For me, been coding C++ for nearly 30 years and last few months have been taking Modula-3 (M3) for a "test drive". M3 is "complete" and early on it was very obvious to me that the "C++ experiment" has gone on for too many decades. The amazing thing is that M3 was "complete" since the late 1980's, thanks to the programming-language gurus at DEC/Olivetti/etc. You can sense in the M3 literature that these/other gurus were aware of the "issues" that C++ would develop in the future. As Wirth would imply, all you need is a lightweight/simple language-core that can be used to create great libraries.

[kragen]

it's unclear whether this comment is describing the extreme opposite of the truth out of ignorance or for satirical purposes