>>26C is
actually a modern way of making
shrunken heads, mind-crippling instead of mind-expanding. When you read the Algol Bulletin[1], you will understand the difference. The first thing on AB33.3.3 is about functional composition with closures. The idea came from
mathematics, not from another programming language.
Mental giants, with knowledge of Fortran, Algol, Cobol, RPG, IPL, Lisp, and
mathematics, created languages like Simula 67, Algol 68, PL/I, and CPL.
The people who made them used their brains to create something new by synthesizing and improving ideas, instead of poorly copying from other languages. Modern languages took so many things from PL/I and Simula 67 that most of them wouldn't be Turing complete or even usable for writing programs if you removed them all. That includes Common Lisp too.
C
mental midgets looked at Simula 67, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Scheme, and Mesa, and created Java 1.0. Brendan Eich was also influenced by Scheme and Self when making JavaScript. This is because syntax and control structures
are important for making a good language. If you copy from C, you get crap.
From what I know about their work on strongly typed capability-based machines[2][3] and how C can't run on them, I think these people would prefer it if we were stuck using BASIC, which could run on that hardware. C can't be a ``modern Algol'' when it's not even what Algol people would consider good in 1960. It's incredibly
dishonest to say that a group that was writing garbage collectors in 1970[4] would want us using C in 2017. It's like calling C a
modern Haskell. In fact, one of the Algol people said that
Haskell is the modern Algol[5]. If you mentioned Fortran, COBOL, BASIC or some other language, I would have posted examples from them too. They are different from Algol but not like C either. People like to call Java a ``new COBOL'' and that's just as offensive to the COBOL programmers and creators. I respect these languages and the people who made them
because they are good and had an influence on languages I like, which have nothing to do with C at all.
[1]
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/algol/algol_bulletin/[2]
http://www.tendra.org/Currie82-praise.pdf[3]
http://www.mca-ltd.com/martin/Ten15/introduction.html[4]
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/paper/ALGOL_68-Implementation.pdf[5]
http://foswiki.cs.uu.nl/foswiki/pub/IFIP21/Rome/algol.pdf