And where is Algol now? It's dead. Theoretical superiority on paper is worth absolutely nothing when there is no usable implementation for modern computing environments out there.

This article was written to make Go look bad and unoriginal, but it inadvertently proves that Go is Algol's legitimate successor exactly _because_ it has all these features _and_ a working implementation that is available for wide variety of architectures and operating systems.

I think Pascal (and Modula and Oberon) are more legitimate successors to Algol.

I wasn't aware that all of those working implementations had stopped working.

Popularity is just one dimension a language can be placed on. Java utterly dominates the volume of new code being written in regular industry and has most likely done so for the entire lifetime of Go.

And this says little about their other relative virtues.

I think it could easily be INTERCAL (and INTERCAL#, of course) dominating the world now, if Sun, IBM and other giants choose it instead of Java and pushed it with the same amount of force.

Fun fact: one of the Oberon-2 developers is also one of the principal developers of Go. Learn your PL history.