Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Luca Cardelli is a member of the Modula-3 design committee. Cardelli is a Principal Researcher and Head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and is an ACM Fellow. Here he chats to Computerworld about the origins of Modula-3, including how the most exciting Modula-3 design meeting ever, was abruptly interrupted by the San Francisco 7.1 earthquake.
I remember reading the Modula-3 manual before even C# existed.
And several C# features were already available on Modula-3, like the unsafe keywords.
The language is really cool, except for its object system, which is a bit unnatural for many developers.
The other thing that puts some developers apart is that it has a Pascal like syntax.
It is a good language nonetheless.
In the early ninethies modula-2 with no real GUI at college
Modula-2? Yes – I still have my Modula-2 books from the mid eighties. Oh, those were the days…
From the article:
(…) the most exciting Modula-3 design meeting ever, was abruptly interrupted by the San Francisco 7.1 earthquake.
Does he mean that it was the most exciting meeting because of the earthquake, or was it exciting in itself, and just unfortunately was interrupted by an earthquake?
No, Modula 2 & 3 did not take of because of Pascal rather than Java, which did adopt the same features, but with backwards compatibility and mature development tools.
Java has too much problems of its own to take over the world. It’s popular in some parts of the programming world, but not a language you can throw at everything.
I never got to use Modular 3, our work had written an application in it, but I never got to work on that project. The closest I got was Delphi, which I still love…
I should check out what M3 has going for it…