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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @09:11PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @09:11PM (#976459)

    Similarly, Lisp will never die. It is the de facto language for software development on new hardware developments. One of the first things they do is write a lisp cross-compiler for it. As the best example of that, all quantum computing code is written or transpiled to lisp.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @10:45PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @10:45PM (#976494)

    Doesn't match with my experience. I would say writing a simple C compiler for it comes very early. But who knows, maybe C is the first compiled language they create and LISP the first interpreted. I don't know.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @12:18AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @12:18AM (#976523)

      C compilers, specifically cross-compilers do come very early. They are considered one of the first steps to commercial support because getting one allows everything that relies on C or the standard library of C to run on it. I'm talking about before that. They often use Lisp because it is fairly easy to turn a subset of Lisp into machine code. These basic structures allow for easy verification and testing of the integration of the hardware units during late development and validation.