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: 4, Interesting) by Samantha Wright on Friday March 27 2020, @08:11PM (2 children)
I... don't think the author should have written this article; it's rife with errors, distortions, and even a few pieces of outright misinformation. A PLT (programming language theory) specialist would've written a much shorter list, with little overlap. And an industry-centric languages list would be much longer, again with many omissions. Even a list of most influential languages (in a genealogical sense) would look quite a bit different from this one. It is regrettable that this is the article that made it to SoylentNews.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday March 27 2020, @08:56PM (1 child)
Honestly most language theorists have no clue what makes a language good. And who can blame them when most developers will opt to use the tool they're most familiar with rather than the tool most appropriate to do the job?
compiling...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @09:48PM
You are right, but...
the best tool is usually the one you know inside-out.
The ramp-up time and potential unknown traps of a language that is new to you usually outweigh any theoretical benefit of adopting a new language along with its supporting ecosystem.
I am assuming the language you already know is a general purpose language: probably not the best at anything, but also not the worst either.