> I don't agree. Lisp is "easy" to parse, but difficult to add structure to.
I have no idea what you mean by this, or how you think it relates to your original claim that having languages with a less terrible grammar than C++ or even C is some recent development.
> Perl is a nightmare
And it's pretty clearly C-inspired, even if it added lots of new syntactic horrors of its own invention. Also, it's late 80ies not early 70ies, so hardly a poster-case for languages becoming grammatically saner.
> About the only language that wasn't hot garbage to parse was Pascal.
In addition to Pascal and Lisp which you already mentioned Algol, Prolog, APL, Smalltalk are all famous languages from around the same time as C or significantly older and none of them are "hot garbage to parse". Neither are important 80ies languages like Postscript or SML. In fact the only significant extant 70s language I can think of from the top of my head that is syntactically noticeably more deranged than C and maybe even C++ is TeX.
> And I seem to recall that was intentional.
Well yes, why would anyone create a language that's really hard to parse for no discernible benefit? This is not the counterintuitive recent insight you make it out to be. If anything, the trend for popular languages would seem to become harder to parse -- none of the significant languages from the 2000s (like Swift, Julia or Rust) are anywhere as easy to parse as the languages I listed above.
I have no idea what you mean by this, or how you think it relates to your original claim that having languages with a less terrible grammar than C++ or even C is some recent development.
> Perl is a nightmare
And it's pretty clearly C-inspired, even if it added lots of new syntactic horrors of its own invention. Also, it's late 80ies not early 70ies, so hardly a poster-case for languages becoming grammatically saner.
> About the only language that wasn't hot garbage to parse was Pascal.
In addition to Pascal and Lisp which you already mentioned Algol, Prolog, APL, Smalltalk are all famous languages from around the same time as C or significantly older and none of them are "hot garbage to parse". Neither are important 80ies languages like Postscript or SML. In fact the only significant extant 70s language I can think of from the top of my head that is syntactically noticeably more deranged than C and maybe even C++ is TeX.
> And I seem to recall that was intentional.
Well yes, why would anyone create a language that's really hard to parse for no discernible benefit? This is not the counterintuitive recent insight you make it out to be. If anything, the trend for popular languages would seem to become harder to parse -- none of the significant languages from the 2000s (like Swift, Julia or Rust) are anywhere as easy to parse as the languages I listed above.