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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!
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If there were one perfect language we would all be using it already.
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Recently:
(2020-03-11) Top 7 Dying Programming Languages to Avoid Studying in 2019-2020
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday March 28 2020, @10:27AM
FORTRAN is still going as a business language as well. Well, the DEC/VAX variant. I know of one major business that is using it, together with the DEC/VAX character-based screen-forms libraries to run applications. It works, the engineers like it, and the is no justification for spending money to replace it. Eventually it will die when the business decides to migrate the data into a newer application.
But yes, FORTRAN was used as the glue for business applications. You can write procedural logic in almost any language.