While doing my customary "whatever happened to" sweep, I ran across this paper of Jules Schwartz (he of JOVIAL) A refreshingly frank evaluation from the author from 1978.
http://jovial.com/documents/p203-schwartz-jovial.pdf (Tidbit: The "J" in JOVIAL does stand for "Jules'", but was not of his doing--rather, he relates that it was done behind his back.) Just on the subject of "languages and how we got here." --Chuck
