> I don't want to work in Oberon (or Pascal) any more than you do (but, to tie it back to this article, I also don't want to work in C++ unless I have to), but in terms of distilling lessons of what is needed from a language, and a learning tool, it is up there with Smalltalk and Lisp (other languages I don't want to work in) as one of a small handful of the language designs that will continue to influence for a long time to come.

Other languages did simplicity better without sacrificing expressiveness by allowing natural extensions of the language. Wirth languages, by being Algol-derived, are overly-complex syntactically in ways that make them non-extensible, and possess ill-considered semantics on top of that.