[HN Gopher] Ten most(ly dead) influential programming languages ...
___________________________________________________________________
Ten most(ly dead) influential programming languages (2020)
Author : ksec
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-12-18 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hillelwayne.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hillelwayne.com)
| boulos wrote:
| Not mentioned in the article or in prior discussions, but Scala
| seems "dead" to me. Or at least extremely niche and unlikely to
| take off.
|
| AFAICT, Scala has basically been replaced by Go for backends and
| Kotlin (or just plain Java) elsewhere.
| cardanome wrote:
| Scala 3 released like a year ago.
|
| Yes, it is niche but not extremely niche. People either into
| functional programming or that are part of the JVM ecosystem
| have at least heard of it. It is one of the big alternative JVM
| languages with Clojure and Kotlin.
|
| Sure it won't ever overtake Java and Kotlin is eating a bit of
| its lunch but Tech is not a popularity contest.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Prior discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22690229 (289 comments;
| March 26, 2020)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24602741 (13 comments; Sept
| 26, 2020)
|
| Some other submissions but with 0 or 1 comment.
| lp4vn wrote:
| I would expand this list with: perl(mostly-dead influential), and
| ceylon and coffescript(these last ones mostly-dead and not so
| influential, let's be honest).
|
| I also would say that ruby is a future mostly-dead language, but
| I don't want to sound too controversial.
| Yahivin wrote:
| CoffeeScript might just be one of the most influential
| languages. Tons of ES6 features were directly inspired by
| CoffeeScript and ES6+ JavaScript is the most popular language
| in the world right now.
| ameliaquining wrote:
| Each of the languages on the list influenced _many_
| subsequent languages, not just one.
| lp4vn wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm not denying that
| coffescript might have inspired ES6+ features, but from this
| to say that it's a very influential, let alone one of the
| most influential languages, is a big leap. In my opinion, of
| course.
| amval wrote:
| > I also would say that ruby is a future mostly-dead language,
| but I don't want to sound too controversial.
|
| Aren't you just saying it anyway? Why do you think this?
| lp4vn wrote:
| I developed a lot of projects with ruby and yet I can't think
| of a single reason to opt for ruby over python or typescript.
| Ruby doesn't do anything better both in terms of language or
| platform than its already very well established competitors.
|
| It's my understanding that ruby rose to prominence mostly
| because of ruby on rails, now that RoR is in a downward trend
| I think ruby will follow the same trend until it's reduced to
| a small community of enthusiasts in the same way that
| happened to perl.
| neilv wrote:
| Additional info about the influence of Simula on Smalltalk:
| http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Cobol is far from dead. It is not sexy and I dont know of any
| systems starting out today using it. But there are massive legacy
| systems till out there.
|
| At least a couple years ago Cobol programmers were in high
| demand.
|
| According to Microfocus [1 (2018)] over 2 million people
| worldwide are active full-time Cobol programmers, and it is
| running quite a few mission critical systems.
|
| >Companies involved in keeping COBOL-based systems working say
| that 95 percent of >ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs,
| 80 percent of in-person >transactions rely on them, and over 40
| percent of banks still use COBOL as the >foundation of their
| systems.
| donkeyd wrote:
| > and I dont know of any systems starting out today using it
|
| I do... In a project I was working on for a major Dutch
| government organization, they were building stuff in COBOL.
| This was a project where we were using NLP for automated data
| extraction. I still find it hilarious that part of it was being
| built in COBOL.
| ithkuil wrote:
| It's not dead, ok.
|
| Can we say it's mostly dead?
|
| For example, is it more or less dead than perl?
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Can we say it's mostly dead?
|
| >> For example, is it more or less dead than perl?
|
| == The current state of Perl 5 for Python fans ==
|
| Perl 5: I'm not dead!
|
| TIOBE: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead!
|
| Internet: Yes he is.
|
| Perl 5: I'm not!
|
| TIOBE: 'E isn't?
|
| Internet: Well... he will be soon--he's very ill...
|
| Perl 5: I'm getting better!
|
| Internet: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
|
| TIOBE: I can't take 'im off like that! It's against
| regulations!
|
| Perl 5: I don't want to go off the chart....
|
| Internet: Oh, don't be such a baby.
|
| TIOBE: I can't take 'im off....
|
| Perl 5: I feel fine!
|
| Internet: Well, do us a favor...
|
| TIOBE: I can't!
|
| Internet: Can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't
| be long...
|
| TIOBE: No, gotta get to Reddit, they lost nine today.
|
| Internet: Well, when's your next round?
|
| TIOBE: Next year.
|
| Perl 5: I think I'll go for a walk....
|
| Internet: You're not fooling anyone, you know-- (to TIOBE)
| Look, isn't there something you can do...?
|
| Perl 5: I feel happy! I feel happy!
| enduser wrote:
| Is someone who is no longer having children but is still a
| major team player at their employer "mostly dead"?
| lolinder wrote:
| Since we're talking about languages, a better question
| would be "is a language in which no new works are written
| but which has a large catalog of past works that are still
| studied by thousands of people 'mostly dead'?"
|
| Most would say yes.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > in which no new works are written
|
| There's a lot of new code written in most of these
| languages. It might be existing systems, but the code
| being written is new.
| wakeupcall wrote:
| Pascal similarly lives on with Deplhi/Lazarus. I know plenty of
| currently supported commercial programs running on Delphi and
| considering a transition to Lazarus.
|
| I've seen an uptick in APL and APL-derived array languages.
| "Niche" would have been a better term. I would put Smalltalk in
| the same category.
|
| What about some commercial languages instead which are de-facto
| dead, such as ColdFusion, ActionScript, Lingo, and so on...
| sys42590 wrote:
| Learning Standard ML made me a better programmer (back in the
| day)... It was all about specifying how input and results are
| related instead of giving instructions to the CPU on what to do.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Didn't Pascal die due to some combination of C and Javas
| popularity and Borland team getting poached by Microsoft in the
| late 90s?
| nrdvana wrote:
| Pascal graduated to Delphi (Object-pascal with built-in GUI
| designer), and had a very healthy run for a decade and was my
| favorite language until Borland corporate stuff happened and a
| cross-licensing deal with Microsoft that turned Delphi into a
| sort of bastard sibling of .NET, and new owner Embercadero
| raised prices out of the reach of most of the small-time users
| that made up a bulk of the userbase. I was in a tiny factory-
| automation engineering group that used it to build user
| interfaces and data reporting for all the factory stations.
| Well, on that note, 3M corporate shut down the factory and
| moved it to China, so maybe other forces were in play to kill
| the userbase.
| miohtama wrote:
| Was is Delphi creator who left Borland, created C#, then
| TypeScript?
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Anders Hejlsberg.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| My sense was Delphi was replaced more by Visual Basic, though
| it's entirely possible that's based on my personal experience
| and didn't represent a larger trend.
| ghaff wrote:
| Turbo Pascal was popular because it was cheap at a time when
| buying a compiler could cost hundreds of dollars. But it really
| never got picked up widely beyond Borland products. BASIC
| options got a bit better. And, yes, C and Java were popular for
| "serious" programming.
| analog31 wrote:
| When I was first exposed to C (perhaps in Byte Magazine), I was
| dead certain that Pascal would win out. I wonder if the minor
| optimizations achieved by programming closer to bare iron on
| early computers led to a minor performance advantage that
| outweighed the need for readable / maintainable code.
| indymike wrote:
| C and Pascal were both fast, but C allowed programmers to
| dynamically allocate and free memory without having to deal
| with 255 character limits and other limitations imposed by
| Pascal. It also allowed us to create some magnificent bugs,
| too.
| nrdvana wrote:
| C did compile to more efficient code than Pascal, but The
| Delphi compiler processed code 10x faster than the C
| compiler, and hit an amazing sweet spot for the 300Mhz
| workstations of the day, where you could iterate through
| edit/compile/run in Delphi just as fast as Visual Basic, and
| when you were done the program ran an order of magnitude
| faster than VB (and maybe 90% as fast as C). Also, because
| the language was easier to parse, the tooling was able to
| interact with your code way better than Borland's same
| product for C++ or any of Microsoft's products, so you were
| getting more accurate code completion and context-sensitive
| help and all that.
|
| I believe that Delphi was a vastly superior product to any of
| its contemporaries, and was killed purely by corporate
| forces.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Depends on what is your opinion about Delphi and Embarcadero
| adra wrote:
| In my youth, I learned basic then Pascal before taking compsci
| in high school. Despite the fact that I was confident in both,
| your course supported both languages, but by far the "not a
| programmer" types chose VB and that was their speed and it's
| was fine. For those of us that really enjoyed programming, we
| learned and loved Pascal/Delphi more, but I'd argue most of us
| transitioned to C/java afterwards. Delphi took a middle ground
| approach that wasn't entirely successful to either of these
| groups.
|
| I still think the biggest mistake MS made with their tooling
| was burying VB6+ and replaced it with VB.net. They may have
| made VB a "real" function extensive language, but I think a
| bunch of soft-programming people just left and never went back.
| C# ate any of those that would've used VB.net in this way
| anyways IMHO.
| Daunk wrote:
| I just want to say that I still enjoy BASIC, but via BlitzMax NG.
| It's a good language to quickly prototype things in -
| https://blitzmax.org/
| silisili wrote:
| The BASIC cause of death is written that it was seen as a lesser,
| kids language.
|
| That sentiment may be true to some extent, but fails to mention
| all of the problems of the BASIC language that made people look
| into alternatives, none of which were snobbiness.
|
| If that were a real reason, Python would have suffered a similar
| fate.
| forinti wrote:
| BASIC was very practical for 8 bit machines. You didn't even
| need an editor, because you could just retype a line. It was
| also very straightforward for a complete novice (as most people
| were with those machines).
|
| In any another environment, it really doesn't make sense.
| layer8 wrote:
| Visual Basic was very successful, until Microsoft turned it
| into a mere alternative syntax for C# [0]. There is a parallel
| universe in which classic Visual Basic would have continued to
| thrive as a win32 glue language. (It still does to a minor
| extent in the form of VBA.)
|
| [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html
| analog31 wrote:
| BASIC illustrates the "one-screen problem," where a program
| becomes unreadable when it exceeds one screen, or perhaps one
| printed page. The one-screen problem is how I explain to
| beginners the value of things like subroutines with named
| arguments, local variables, and the like. Languages that
| survive, have to work for the size of programs that people want
| or need to write.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > BASIC illustrates the "one-screen problem," where a program
| becomes unreadable when it exceeds one screen, or perhaps one
| printed page.
|
| Python has the same problem though, as do "scripting"
| languages in general. The limit may be some low amount of
| "screens" as opposed to a literal screenful of text, but
| either way it's quite impossible to program "in the large"
| with it. Even Go is hampered in this domain by its limited
| abstractions.
| swayvil wrote:
| That a language might overcome the "any hunk of code bigger
| than a screenfull is too complex to manage", other than by
| chopping the code into functions and classes or whatever,
| is news to me.
|
| What are other methods for slaying this complexity? And
| what are the languages that use it?
| pornel wrote:
| I think it's all of the languages people complain are
| "too complex": to be able to deal with more of program's
| complexity, you take on more language complexity.
|
| e.g.:
|
| * Encapsulation. Keeping implementation details private
| is pointless when you deal with a small program (the
| implementation is right there on your screen), but it
| becomes valuable when otherwise it'd be too hard to check
| which details you can change and which you can't.
|
| * Strong type systems. All the types are obvious when the
| program fits in your head, and seem like unnecessary
| boilerplate. However, when the program is large, it off-
| loads a bunch of sanity checks from your head to the
| compiler.
|
| Same goes for design patterns. Writing an
| `AbstractWidget` and `WidgetFactory` when you have two
| widgets to deal with is overcomplicating. But when you
| have 50 widgets, you need something to avoid drowning in
| copypaste and spaghetti if/elses.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Oh, you shouldn't really be comparing unreadability of
| BASIC to even Unix shell scripts. Python is the pinnacle of
| readability and structure in comparison.
|
| Let's see...
|
| Numbered lines as labels, GOTO everywhere. You got GOSUB if
| you were lucky.
|
| All state propagated mostly via global variables.
| Subroutine parameters were present in dialects few and far
| between.
|
| Now, variables. Maximum length of an identifier was what,
| 1? Or 2?
|
| Inconsistent delimiters and syntax in general. Take GW-
| BASIC and its hot mess of graphical commands. Here you
| can't have parentheses, but there you must. Semicolons
| here, commas there.
|
| All the stuff that makes programs readable -- consistent
| syntax, named procedures, reasonably long variable names,
| named labels if you must -- all appeared very late, in
| QBASIC I think. But the rest of the BASIC world still had
| to cater to the lowest common denominator if your program
| was to be even mildly portable.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| QBasic (actually QuickBASIC; QBasic being the IDE) fixed some
| of the more glaring deficiencies of the original BASIC and I
| think was pretty popular for quite some time. I tried it and
| didn't like it--as I recall, I found things like error handling
| awkward. But it was from Microsoft and stayed around for quite
| some time.
|
| Although Turbo Pascal was also popular for a time, I'm not sure
| anything truly replaced these beginner-friendly languages until
| Python came along.
| eternalban wrote:
| That chart with Java is amazing. And in my personal case, also
| true. Actually paid for something called SmalltalkAgents (which
| was pretty cool btw) just a bit before Java happened. Then Java
| happened.
|
| On QKS' SmalltalkAgents: http://computer-programming-
| forum.com/3-smalltalk/fe67cb349c...
|
| (amazed that there is not a single image of this software on the
| net.)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| PL/1 was an IBM mainframe language; but Intel made a compiler for
| a stripped-down version targeting 8086, called PL/M (Programming
| Language for Microprocessors). PL/M was (I believe) the main
| language used in writing the CTOS/BTOS operating system
| (Convergent Technologies/Burroughs).
|
| PL/M was a nice language. It was suited for system programming
| (structs, pointers). I first came across it in some introductory
| programming book I bought from a second-hand crate. A lot of my
| early programming lessons came from that book, even though I had
| no access to a PL/M compiler. I have no idea who wrote it, or
| what its title was.
| karmakaze wrote:
| My encounter with PL/I was with some 3270-style Wang terminals
| for their minicomputers. They were programmable by writing PL/I
| which got compiled and stored in the terminal's NVRAM. There
| wasn't much you couldn't do with it, I made macros that could
| copy blocks of text between two different terminal sessions as
| well as a bunch of cursor positioning and general clipboard
| operations. PL/I is quite a nice language.
| Rochus wrote:
| PL/M was a nice language indeed; I used it on embedded 8085
| based systems; but I don't think it had many overlaps with
| PL/I; but there were similarities.
| uncletaco wrote:
| I worked at a bank and the truth of the matter is COBOL is never
| going away. Most large banks run on it.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It will go away one large bank bankruptcy at a time (perhaps
| several at a time in case of country bankrupcy). Who is going
| to use COBOL for a new project at a new bank ?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Surprised this doesn't mention Smalltalk's huge influence on two
| major living languages: Objective-C and Ruby, both of which use
| the Smalltalk object model, dynamic message passing paradigm and
| all, which is very different from how most other OOP
| implementations work.
|
| In the long run: Objective-C will be gone in 20 years, but Ruby
| won't. Outside of ObjC interop facilities, Swift will retain some
| of Objective-C's Smalltalk heritage, as one of many influences.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| On that topic, there is a very good (and funny) talk by Bret
| Victor called "The Future of Programming" presented as if it were
| 1973.
|
| It gives an interesting tour of dead languages and the things we
| lost.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4
| bepvte wrote:
| This is one of the best talks I've seen, do you have any other
| recommendations?
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| > That's one reason I love studying history. To learn what we've
| lost and find it again.
|
| Same here. There's a lot of amazing things which we have yet to
| learn from the 'also ran' systems of history.
| cardanome wrote:
| Most of these languages are neither dead nor dying. They are just
| niche.
|
| I just started learning APL this year. It is still actively
| developed and no you don't need a special keyboard. Plus we have
| unicode now which makes the special symbols a non-issue these
| days.
|
| Same with most of the other languages. There is Pharo and Squeak
| for Smalltalk, the pascal community has free pascal. Sure those
| communities might not be huge but they are not in acute danger of
| vanishing any time soon.
|
| And COBOL is still carrying the economy.
|
| Now some languages like ALGOL might actually be dying, sure.
|
| Natural languages are considered dead when they lose their last
| native speaker. Similarly when the last person being able to use
| a programming languages dies, we can consider that language dead.
|
| Which means that we have lots of languages that died at
| childbirth but once a programing language has managed to go over
| a certain popularity threshold, it is very hard to kill.
|
| Languages don't need to win any popularity contests to be alive.
| Language maximalism in the sense that you need to be one of the
| most popular languages or you are considered a failure and dead
| is just silly.
| __jem wrote:
| > Natural languages are considered dead when they lose their
| last native speaker. Similarly when the last person being able
| to use a programming languages dies, we can consider that
| language dead.
|
| I don't think this is the right comparison. A native speaker
| would be more like someone who learned the language as their
| first or maybe second language, rather than someone who can use
| it at all. And by that metric, these languages are pretty much
| dead/dying, since they mostly have no new learners who aren't
| into PL history.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| As a parallel, there are plenty of people that speak Latin.
| cardanome wrote:
| > since they mostly have no new learners who aren't into PL
| history.
|
| They do have have new learners, that was my whole point.
| Whether they learn out of historical interest, to become
| better programmer in general, for a job, for research, or
| because they need it for a specific project does not matter.
| (And yes all those reasons apply.)
|
| Take a look at companies using APL:
| https://github.com/interregna/arraylanguage-companies
|
| Or look how many people use it to solve Advent of Code.
|
| As for learning them as a first language, if we applied that
| criteria then most programming languages would be born
| absolutely dead and stay there. I don't think anyone ever
| learned Elm or Purescript as their first language, are they
| dead?
|
| I really don't get why people make such weird claims,
| declaring healthy and obviously alive communities to be dead.
| Again, things don't need to popular to be alive.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Most of these languages are neither dead nor dying.
|
| They were sent by Jack Sparrow to settle his debt. Technical
| debt of course.
| LeFantome wrote:
| Lazarus ( Free Pascal ) seems to be thriving actually. APL is
| probably as big as it ever was. COBOL will shrink over time but
| it may still outlast me. I have no insight into SmallTalk but
| my University curriculum included it and it would not surprise
| me at all to see it used academically today. I was also taught
| Scheme and Fortran and those are still going strong. If I
| wanted to use any of these, I know I can find both free and
| commercial dev environments easily that run on platforms I
| still use.
|
| Is ALGOL still in use anywhere though? Is there a compiler
| available that runs on anything modern? I genuinely curious.
| agumonkey wrote:
| What were your use cases for APL ? I love it to bits on
| principles but never used it seriously, despite all the efforts
| of dyalog and Aaron Hsu.
|
| niche languages have a flavour that mainstream spoils with
| feverish fads.. I always like to read perl or TCL forums and am
| surprised by the ideas and productions.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Finance/quant people sometimes use J which is some kind of
| APL:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)
|
| Edit: also _K something something_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kx_Systems
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| APL is a great language for on the fly number crunching,
| which is pretty niche like writing with shorthand as a
| stenographer.
| andolanra wrote:
| Sure is lucky that the title of the post explicitly says
| "mostly dead" and includes a big disclaimer about how not all
| of them are dead, then!
| JadeNB wrote:
| Also, as was obscured by the title mangler, the "dead" in the
| title is just a side remark; the title without the
| parenthesis is "10 most influential programming languages",
| and "(ly dead)" after "most" is just a parenthesis.
| dang wrote:
| Maybe we'll just revert to the linkbaity title in this
| case. I had it briefly as "Mostly-dead, influential
| programming languages (2020)" but that probably did more
| harm than good.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| lolinder wrote:
| > Natural languages are considered dead when they lose their
| last native speaker. Similarly when the last person being able
| to use a programming languages dies, we can consider that
| language dead.
|
| Someone "able to use a programming language" more directly
| parallels someone able to speak a language at all, by which
| measure Latin would not yet be dead. If you're going to draw
| the line there, that would be what linguists term an "extinct
| language".
|
| It's hard to draw parallels to natural language because there
| are no native speakers of programming languages. The closest
| parallel I can think of is that a language can be considered
| dead when no new projects are started in it. Once you've
| reached that point, the remaining work in the language is
| maintenance, which is comparable to people studying and
| translating old Sanskrit texts.
|
| Alternatively, a language can be considered dead when it has
| stopped changing and frozen in its final form.
|
| By either of these measures a lot of these still aren't dead,
| but my bet would be that COBOL counts.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > my bet would be that COBOL counts.
|
| Didn't COBOL recently (in COBOL terms) get object oriented
| features?
|
| See https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.2?topic=programs-
| wri...
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| This was a great trip down memory lane for an old retired
| sometime programmer and software engineer. I learned programming
| in K & K BASIC on a GE time share machine and FORTRAN II on an
| IBM 7090. I wrote production code in many of these languages
| (BASIC, COBOL, PL/I (not much), Pascal, SmallTalk (my favorite)).
| Among the odder "language" projects I ever worked on was a cross-
| compiler written in Pascal for a report generator. The compiler
| generated COBOL as it's object code, which we chose because of
| it's facility with reading database records, and formatting
| output for fixed spacing line printers.
|
| I'm familiar with all but a couple of the languages in his list,
| and wrote code in most of them, although in some cases not code
| that ever went into a product or production environment. ML and
| CLU, though, I've never touched.
| graymatters wrote:
| Can someone with real knowledge on deployment and usage of these
| language tell where are they being used (beyond a dedicated
| hobbyist community)? Which industries? What systems? Volume of
| transactions? Genuinely interested and will appreciate it. Thank
| you in advance.
| melenaos wrote:
| I once learned Ada for a NATO project. I was amazed by the
| simplicity you could start a thread and monitor it.
|
| Its not dead but you will never see it trending. Its just a niche
| language as most of the languages at the post are.
| elcritch wrote:
| My only real exposire to Ada was a report for a class project
| in college. One tidbit that stuck with me is that there were a
| few DOD projects using Ada after it was first created which
| actually got done ahead of schedule and under budget. That
| always impressed me given the normal DOD software track record.
|
| Also, I believe people place way too much emphasis on
| "popularity" of a language. If a language has enough traction
| to stay alive it can be valuable unless you're doing the most
| generic web dev stuff around. Heck there's cases where Perl
| still outshines modern competitors.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| I'll shout out for ADA as well. Really enjoyed working with it.
| Compiler was a nit picking monster but the rigour ensured that
| you really considered your program. Thanks for making me
| remember.
| miohtama wrote:
| A bit unrelated, but comes to the features of different languages
| and who introduced.
|
| Does anyone else still remember how JavaScript prototypical
| inheritance was touted as a "good" idea?
| theCrowing wrote:
| Pascal gives me flashbacks to the 90s in Germany every Prof was
| into it.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I think Pascal's sun set because Borland killed it with Delphi.
|
| In my opinion, Borland was the 300lbs gorilla in the Pascal
| compiler arena, so when Borland decided to move push Delphi
| over Pascal, there was no interest in filling the Pascal hole.
|
| btw I wrote commercial products on Pascal that I thought was
| neat. A chat program that used IPX/SPX, a a fax server using
| DesqView, and MS Mail queues both inbound and outbound, reverse
| delta databases that stored all changes at field level,
| overcame the 640K memory barrier by using a TSR that swapped
| the data in/out on demand, and a proto-PXE server using my
| insanely fast copy program over IPX. That was the good old
| times.
| FpUser wrote:
| I still use Delphi for my Windows desktop product and Lazarus
| for Linux desktop software
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I have a very fond memories of Delphi, but if I need
| something custom nowadays (think utils, not something SAP-
| like) I just write it in PowerShell.
| fm2606 wrote:
| Pascal was the introductory computer language at my college in
| 1988. I don't remember much of it.
| Rochus wrote:
| > _While SIMULA wasn't the first "true" OOP language, it was the
| first language with proper objects and laid much of the
| groundwork that others would build on._
|
| This is wrong. Simula 67 was the first object-oriented
| programming language; though the term is said to be coined by
| Alan Kay who specified Smalltalk-72; but he understood and still
| understands object-orientation differently than we understand it
| today; our understanding of it today is more like what Simula 67
| introduced; remarkably, Smalltalk-76 represented a significant
| departure from Smalltalk-72 toward the concepts already known in
| Simula 67; the primary difference of Smalltalk 76 from Simula was
| dynamic typing and the conception of even simple types as
| classes. Simula 67 was still actively used in the nineties (e.g.
| as a teaching language at Stockholm University until 1997). The
| performance was comparable to that of C++ or Pascal, definitely
| faster than Smalltalk on comparable machines.
| danbmil99 wrote:
| FORTH
|
| Lives on in every stack machine
| JadeNB wrote:
| The whole point of this list is to chronicle influential (but
| "mostly dead") programming languages; if they were counted as
| alive because of their influences, then they'd still be alive.
|
| But, also, Forth isn't on the list.
| worik wrote:
| Where is C++ on that list?
| miohtama wrote:
| None of the other programming language compilers in the world
| would not build anymore if C++ would be dead or dying.
| tmtvl wrote:
| By what possible metric could you consider C++ "mostly dead"?
| I'm fairly sure that most, if not all AAA games nowadays are
| coded in C++, for example. Never mind such little known
| projects like GCC, Qt, and LLVM. It's not a language I care to
| use, but it's clearly still very healthy: widely used and
| regularly updated.
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| Most programs you use and internet infrastructure are written
| in C and C++. Furthermore, it's actively used to develop new
| software everyday by most large companies.
| adra wrote:
| I'd say your first comment is very true and your second is
| very untrue. There will be sectors that will generally
| gravitate to c/c++, and a huge boatload that won't touch them
| with a ten foot pole. Corp languages are jvm based, .net
| based, js/ts, and maybe Go in some contexts now. None of the
| companies I've worked at in like 15 years has decided to
| create new c++ projects (clearly subjective view).
| FpUser wrote:
| And then they woke up.
| gumby wrote:
| > BASIC was the first language with a real-time interpreter (the
| Dartmouth Time Sharing System), beating APL by a year.
|
| Of course Steve Russell wrote the first Lisp interpreter years
| before that.
|
| Not to take away the significance of BASIC, but that wasn't it. I
| think in fact many of the "Significance" sections are rather
| condescending; COBOL was significant in being the first "mass"
| high level language, transformational in the same was BASIC was
| (and more than BASIC).
|
| FORTRAN was hugely influential on computing, is mentioned all
| through the article, yet isn't considered "influential"?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| More like it's not considered mostly dead (still used and
| taught in high performance computing).
| ameliaquining wrote:
| Fortran presumably didn't make the list because it's not dead.
| Scientific-computing labs still use it directly, and perhaps
| more importantly, if you write code today that does any kind of
| linear algebra, it's probably using foundational libraries that
| are written in Fortran and still actively maintained as such,
| even though most users call them through FFI from newer
| languages that offer a better developer experience.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| My friend is working on KlongPy
| (https://github.com/briangu/klongpy) which is has a terse array-
| notation language similar to APL.
|
| I'm curious: Is there anything interesting in APL that hasn't yet
| been implemented in NumPy, etc.?
| habibur wrote:
| Windows Win32 API still uses Pascal calling convention instead of
| standard C. Shadow from the dead.
|
| And also there was the 4th generation language movement at that
| time, 4GL. Defined by coding like writing English sentences, and
| not much algo. More akin to our no-code, low-code trend. SQL was
| also a child from 4GL. C/C++ was then seen as 3GL. And then we
| can now watch 3GL ultimately took over 4GL, at least until now,
| for half a century.
|
| Tidbits.
|
| Corrected: COBOL was 3GL.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| COBOL came well before the 4th generation of programming
| languages - it was one of the earliest 3rd-gen languages. One
| could argue that like 4th-gen languages it was domain specific,
| but most programming languages back then were tailored to
| rather narrow domains.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I have a mild interest in obscure languages.
|
| Pascal is almost dead but still there is Delphi,
| FreePascal/Lazarus and Oxygen. They are all being actively
| developed. I just wish Embarcadero would stop charging an insane
| amount for Delphi.
|
| Basic is even more nearly dead. There are still a few interesting
| things left like:
|
| https://www.purebasic.com/
|
| Up until a few years ago at least, and I still think it is the
| case Epic (https://www.epic.com/) had a huge amount of their
| codebase in Visual Basic classic.
| shakow wrote:
| > Basic is even more nearly dead
|
| I would not say so. The BASIC used in the Office pack is the
| last child of the MS-
| BASIC/GWBASIC/QBASIC/QuickBasic/VisualBasic lineage, is still
| (unfortunately?) very much alive, and probably powering a much
| bigger part of the modern world than we should be comfortable
| with.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I was also exposed to a variant of BASIC in high school
| through my scientific calculator. I wonder if it is still the
| case ?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| VBA isn't that bad a language. Compiles to native and runs
| with impressive speed. Lots of built in libraries for numeric
| programming among other things and fairly easy to call into
| any dll. The issue is it's accessibility. Like JS and Python
| people blame the language for what happens when you hand
| people with no software training and an interest only in
| solving their immediate problem, a computer language they are
| productive in.
|
| And how can we call basic dead when VB.net is still in the
| tiobe top 10?
| Tozen wrote:
| The problem with claims of Pascal being dead or almost dead, is
| there are competing interests and evangelists of rival
| languages who wish it to be dead, and Pascal/Object Pascal
| simply won't do them the favor. As partially shown by Object
| Pascal being consistently ranked around #15 (for many years) on
| the TIOBE index (sometimes a bit higher and sometimes a bit
| lower).
|
| To say Pascal/Object Pascal is almost dead, is to ignore how
| much more used and taught the language is over known and hyped
| languages in the media such as Go, Rust, Swift, Julia, etc...
| Nobody says that those languages are "almost dead", yet
| Pascal/Object Pascal is as or more used than any of them.
|
| One aspect of the confusion over if Pascal is dead or not, has
| to do with naming and marketing. Delphi is an IDE/compiler of
| the Object Pascal language. People can of heard the name
| Delphi, and know its still very alive, but have no idea or
| don't realize the language is Object Pascal. In the same
| context, this goes for Oxygene, and to a lesser degree, for
| Free Pascal/Lazarus, PascalABC, etc... People aren't aware of
| how they connect as dialects of Pascal/Object Pascal, and get
| confused by the names and marketing.
| zeroc8 wrote:
| Well, the real problem is that people are not writing native
| Windows applications anymore, that's what Delphi was good at.
| And Embarcadero also priced themselves out of the market,
| they should have had a long hard look at Jetbrains and how
| those guys thrived in an overcrowded market.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _That's one reason I love studying history. To learn what we've
| lost and find it again._
| latenightcoding wrote:
| As someone who still loves Perl I don't want to say Perl is
| mostly-dead, but it's dying and it influenced all popular
| scripting languages today.
| melling wrote:
| It's been dying for 15 years. First slowly then "all of a
| sudden"
|
| What's merlyn doing these days?
|
| His response to the early warnings that "Perl is dying " was
| "more people use Perl now more than ever"
|
| The downfall of Perl should be a "case study". Other
| communities should learn from the Perl community's mistakes.
|
| Java also had many problems for quite some time but its
| frequent update cycle seems to have helped.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> What's merlyn doing these days?
|
| It looks like he's still doing Perl:
|
| http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/
|
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-
| perl-8th/97814...
| cardanome wrote:
| Perl is nod dying but but in a process of metamorphosis with
| hope to one day turn into the beautiful butterfly that is Raku
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-18 23:00 UTC)