The Emperor's Old Clothes Alive
Hoare's Turing Award lecture — a confession that he designed ALGOL W too conservatively, and the famous line about ALGOL 60 being 'an improvement on most of its successors.'
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Created by Tony Hoare
Hoare's 1980 Turing Award lecture (published February 1981) surveyed his career's failures — ALGOL W rejected in favor of 68, the failed Elliott 503 OS — and drew the lesson that languages survive by simplicity and restraint, not ambition.
Its famous close predicts computing will need 'a far greater degree of simplicity and purity of design' — delivered by a man who had just spent a decade proving programs correct. The lecture is the classic argument that language design's core skill is knowing what to leave out.