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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!
<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: 1) by pTamok on Saturday March 28 2020, @10:33AM (5 children)
Latin isn't dead. It is still, for example, the official language of the Holy See.
There are also plenty of books of historical interest written in Latin, for which a working fluency is necessary.
There are plenty of natural languages that are dead. No written records, last speakers dead.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 28 2020, @12:05PM (1 child)
Actually there are also dead languages with written records, but nobody being able to read those.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:05AM
Aren't they zombie languages?
I thought of Linear-A, the Phaistos Disc, Rongorongo, and the Voynich manuscript: any others?
...to answer myself, of course there are: there's a Wikipedia list of undeciphered scripts [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @12:08PM
I was taught in high school that dead languages were defined as those that never change. No words added. No meanings change. There was no qualification of speaker existence or written texts. Since some of these programming languages are under active development, that definition does not apply. Of course this definition was in regard to spoken language.
Of course the definition could have changed. "Scholars" from generation to generation tend to change definitions of commonly accepted things because reasons. I guess you need to do something to justify your existence and get published.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Monday March 30 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
Okay. Maybe Latin is not really dead.
It is informative that you don't raise any objections that I mentioned French is a dead language not being used.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday March 30 2020, @09:11PM
I've moderated you "Touché" for that.
The useful working definition, that someone else has provided, of a dead language being one that does not change, obviously rules out French as being dead.
But you slipped it in nicely there. Please excuse the double entendre, which, curiously enough, is not a phrase used in French. In French, such word play is termed double sens [wikipedia.org]