SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Saturday March 28 2020, @01:02AM
FORTRAN is alive and well for numerical simulations. It will probably be here a very long time. Part of it is that it is extremely difficult to validate a numerical model to any degree of certainty, so when you have code that works, you try to disturb it as little as possible. That's why even in software still under development, you still find big chunks of code in FORTRAN 77. It's not at all uncommon to find software that still refers to the input file as a 'deck' and individual lines in the file as 'cards'
Another reason is that by it's nature it's easier for compilers to optimize FORTRAN. No pointer alias problems, the language defines the size of variable types (where in C, until recently, the machine defined the types) etc. While compilers for other languages have caught up now, in the '90s and early 2000's, FORTRAN code simply compiled down to faster executables.