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10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages:
The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a "preposterous table I just made up." He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as "most significant" but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it's "mostly dead". Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what "significant in history" means.
So let's talk about some "mostly dead" languages and why they matter so much.
Disclaimer: Yeah not all of these are dead and not all of these are forgotten. Like most people have heard of Smalltalk, right? Also there's probably like a billion mistakes in this, because when you're doing a survey of 60 years of computing history you're gonna get some things wrong. Feel free to yell at me if you see anything!
Disclaimer 2: Yeah I know some of these are "first to invent" and others are "first to popularize". History is complicated!
<no-sarcasm>
If there were one perfect language we would all be using it already.
</no-sarcasm>
Recently:
(2020-03-11) Top 7 Dying Programming Languages to Avoid Studying in 2019-2020
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @07:46PM
FORTRAN is still going, but it is alive only in a very particular niche: high performance numerical simulations.
I was surprised to learn that some old popular software (like text adventures, other stuff) from the 60s and early 70s were written in Fortran. Even 30 years ago, I thought it was purely used for number crunching! I never thought it would be used for text processing, but then, we used to process text using C, and that language doesn't even have a real string type. I guess you just use whatever language is commonly available more than anything else.