What Would the Pioneers of European Programming Say About Today’s AI Coding?

In the 1960s and 1970s, programming language development entered a golden age, marked by the emergence of high‑level languages such as Fortran and the hardware‑independent ALGOL 60, which introduced recursion, local variables, and block structures that influence most modern languages.

The Three European Turing Award Giants

Niklaus Wirth (Switzerland) created eight languages, most famously Pascal . He formulated the famous equation Program = Data Structure + Algorithm and received the Turing Award in 1984 for his innovative language designs.

Edsger Dijkstra (Netherlands) invented the shortest‑path algorithm and semaphores, and famously declared “Goto is harmful.” He earned the Turing Award in 1972 for his contributions to structured programming.

Tony Hoare (United Kingdom) invented the quicksort algorithm, Hoare logic for program verification, the CSP model for concurrent processes, and introduced the infamous null reference that later caused billions of dollars in errors. He received the Turing Award in 1980 for his fundamental work on language definition and design.

ALGOL 60 and Its Legacy

In January 1960, pioneers including John Backus (Fortran), John McCarthy (Lisp), and Alan Jay Perlis gathered in Paris and produced ALGOL 60, a language independent of hardware that made algorithm description easier. ALGOL 60 introduced recursion, block structures ( begin…end), and local variables, becoming the ancestor of most modern language syntaxes.

Dijkstra admired ALGOL 60, calling its creation “the moment computer science became a discipline.” Seven months later he built the first ALGOL 60 compiler in the Netherlands, a full year ahead of other groups, and introduced the stack concept to support recursion.

Dijkstra also organized an ALGOL 60 training course that Hoare attended. After learning the language, Hoare implemented it on his company’s machines, achieving high efficiency and gaining attention from the international academic community, which led to his involvement in the IFIP working group that maintained and evolved ALGOL.

Quicksort – A Story from Hoare’s Early Career

In 1959, a young Hoare worked at Elliott Brothers and was sent to Moscow State University for a machine‑translation project. He needed to sort Russian words quickly; bubble sort and insertion sort were too slow. He devised the “divide‑and‑conquer” idea: pick a reference student, place shorter students to the left and taller ones to the right, then recursively apply the same process to each side. This method, illustrated in the following diagram, is the classic quicksort algorithm with a time complexity of O(n log n).

After returning to the UK, Hoare’s boss asked him to write a Shell sort. Hoare replied, “Don’t use Shell sort; I know a faster algorithm.” The boss wagered six pence, which Hoare won, proving quicksort’s superiority.

Pascal’s Birth and Popularity

In 1966, Wirth and Hoare proposed improvements to ALGOL, which were rejected as too conservative. Frustrated, they left the ALGOL group and created ALGOL W, where Hoare introduced the controversial null reference.

In 1970, Wirth refined ALGOL W into the now‑famous Pascal . To aid implementation on various computers, he built a compiler that generated intermediate code for a virtual machine rather than direct machine code.

Wirth’s 1976 book “Program = Algorithm + Data Structure” popularized the Pascal formula worldwide.

Pascal quickly gained academic acceptance. In 1982, Wirth’s former student Philippe Kahn founded Borland, which released the revolutionary IDE Turbo Pascal in 1983 for only US $49.95. Turbo Pascal’s speed and low price made it a staple in education.

Anders Hejlsberg, later known for C# and TypeScript, was inspired by the “Tiny Pascal” compiler described in Wirth’s book when building Turbo Pascal.

“Goto Is Harmful” and Its Ripple Effect

In 1968, Dijkstra submitted a paper to ACM condemning the overuse of the goto statement and advocating structured programming. The paper’s title, “A Case Against the Goto Statement,” was retitled by editor Wirth to the now‑famous “Goto Statement Considered Harmful.”

The phrase sparked intense debate. While many followed Dijkstra’s view, others—including Kernighan & Ritchie in “The C Programming Language,” and later Linus Torvalds and Steve McConnell—argued that goto can be useful for error handling, speed, and clarity in certain contexts. In 2013, the Linux kernel still contained roughly 100 000 goto statements.

The “‑is‑harmful” construction became a meme in computing, spawning variations such as “global variables are harmful,” “MD5 is harmful,” and “human‑centered design is harmful.”

Legacy and Closing Thoughts

Wirth, Dijkstra, and Hoare—all European, all Turing Award winners for language‑related work—are rightly called the three giants of European programming languages. Their pioneering ideas on structured programming, algorithms, and language design continue to influence modern software development.

Beyond them, Norway’s Ole‑Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard invented the object‑oriented language Simula, also passing away in 2002.

The concepts and features of most programming languages we use today were invented in the 1960s‑70s. As the pioneers age and pass on, the golden era of language invention has ended, but their legacy lives on in every line of code we write.