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posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 27 2020, @06:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the its-not-dead-its-just-resting dept.

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


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by istartedi on Friday March 27 2020, @08:39PM (1 child)

    by istartedi (123) on Friday March 27 2020, @08:39PM (#976442) Journal

    Continuation Oriented Recursive Object Numerical Analyzer?

    Features: No function is valid unless it uses call/cc in some way, and if you attempt to encapsulate call/cc in some other control structure, it's an error. All data structure definitions must be self-referencing, and any attempt to create a data structure that is non-numerical such as a "string" is detected by the compiler and is an error. If there are fewer than 2 monads per line of code, that's an error. Somewhere between 30 and 40% of functions must use point-free style (infix function composition with the dot operator) or the program won't compile. Must indent 5 spaces on each line, although two slashes denote indentation of blocks. Comments begin with a curly brace, and end with a right parenthesis.

    --
    Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Funny=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 30 2020, @09:39PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday March 30 2020, @09:39PM (#977375) Journal

    must also feature an lp0 printer on fire? error, feature no garbage collection so the main memory is slowly drowned with built in requests for more memory than required for any running function, and must periodically push random core dumps to the screen (Common Object Universal Glyph Html) that may cause the program to propagate to other machines.

    --
    This sig for rent.