Algol58 seems to have been the most successful in terms of important applications still in use.

From Wikipedia:

JOVIAL is an acronym for "Jules Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language." The "International Algorithmic Language" was a name originally proposed for ALGOL 58. It was developed to compose software for the electronics of military aircraft by Jules Schwartz in 1959.

Then:

Notable systems using JOVIAL include the Milstar Communications Satellite, Advanced Cruise Missile, B-52, B-1B, B-2 bombers, C-130, C-141, and C-17 transport aircraft, F-111, F-15, F-16 (prior to Block 50), and F-117 fighter aircraft, LANTIRN, U-2 aircraft, E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft, Navy Aegis cruisers, Army Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, F100, F117, and F119 jet engines, the NORAD air defense & control system (Hughes HME-5118ME system) and RL-10 rocket engines. Airborne radar systems with embedded JOVIAL software include the APG-70, APG-71 and APG-73

ALGOL 68 was used in part of DRA for the same purpose. cf. Wikipedia:

The '''Defence Research Agency''' (normally known as '''DRA'''), was an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) from April 1991 until April 1995. At the time the DRA was Britain's largest science and technology organisation.

DRA’s Algol68 compiler was finally open-sourced in April 1999 and is now available for linux for download from sourceforge. (However an interpreter for “Algol68g” is easier to use).

ICL’s Algol68 was/is S3 – It was developed by the UK company International Computers Limited (ICL) for its 2900 Series mainframes. It is a system programming language based on ALGOL 68 but with data types and operators aligned to those offered by the 2900 Series. It was the implementation language of the operating system VME.

There are (at least) two other British operating systems – Flex and CambridgeCAPcomputer – written in Algol68 variants. And also 1 Soviet OS: ???????-1 (Elbrus-1), but I have yet to find any of their source code. (If anyone can find and distribute to this source code please let me know)

BTW: I believe that VME is still running – in production – as a Linux/Unixware guest VM. Mostly at Commonwealth of Nations Custom/Immigration services.

Also over the same period the USSR was using Algol68, c.f. history link. Algol68 is used in Russian telephone exchanges. And Algol58 was used in the Russian “Buran/?????” Space Shuttle landing system.

ALGOL68 was internationalized in 1968. I suspect there are other Algol projects in other countries. esp in German, in Dutch Japanese and Chinese but I have no details.

If you want to actually tryout Algol68 and/or contribute your code, check out Rosettacode’s ALGOL 68 repository, then as a class project try one of the “Tasks not implemented”. http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Reports:TasksnotimplementedinALGOL_68

Java even offers you more to choose from in the IDE world. You want a “Fisher Price” looking IDE like Visual Studios, Java has Netbeans, you want something more advanced, use Eclipse or IntelliJ. You want an IDE that supports Perl, PHP, Ruby, and more, you can only find this in Netbeans and Eclipse. You want an IDE that has a slew of free plug-ins, you can only find this in Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ.

I have worked with .Net (C#) using Visual Studios, J2EE (Java) using Eclipse, Netbeans, and IntelliJ, and I can honestly tell you that I prefer Java. I base my decision on everything that I have mentioned above.

Why would i want to pay licenses for everything msoft when i can deploy a enterprise scale java based solution that can run on the linux i choose and not pay license fees.

The open source aspect and the size of the community is vast.

@John Perry. I’m with you man. I constantly hear buzz words like scalable, robust, blah blah blah. With the new tech, I have to constantly keep up with things…not good enough to know the tech anymore, but now I have to know paradims about how to apply the tech, and if I don’t follow those paradims my code is now “ucky” to the hip hop herd of next gen programmers, even though typically my code works just as well as my “agile” counter parts, and somehow I get it done faster and follow on programmers can look at it and understand what I’m trying to do. I’m not against OOP and all (I use simple business and data objects all the time), but in web development ultimately we are taking data, storing data, and displaying data. We can make that as simple or as complex as we feel like. Me, I like to stick to KISS, but sometimes KISS programming doesn’t looks as good on a resume. And with the younger gen, it is a lot about hype and form over substance. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t brilliant younger programmers, there are, but I think programming has finally become main stream enough so that we suffer from fads.

Oh yeah, on Java, it was the right idea. Develop apps against a runtime instead of HTML in a browser. That we you have a full programming language with 100’s of prebuilt classes to help you along. Sounds like concepts behind Silverlight and Flex huh? Java was just batched, and M$ leveled its sights at Sun early on. So far the only company to stand against M$ is Apple, which is both a blessing and a curse.

It’s only a matter of Java’s burn rate.

Unlike the liquid stock market where you can SELL NOW, Java has momentum due to huge it’s investment, pride, and ego.