[HN Gopher] Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)
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Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)
Author : azhenley
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-07-12 20:50 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hillelwayne.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hillelwayne.com)
| Rochus wrote:
| How can COBOL be a "dead" or "mostly dead" language if it still
| handles over 70% of global business transactions (with ~800
| billion lines of code and still growing). See e.g.
| https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/cobol-market....
| dlachausse wrote:
| BASIC is the scripting language used by Microsoft Office.
| Saying that it powers millions of businesses is probably not an
| exaggeration.
|
| Pascal, particularly the Delphi/Object Pascal flavor, is also
| still in widespread use today.
| Rochus wrote:
| Also Smalltalk is still in wide use; ML is also used; there
| are even many PL/I applications in use today and IBM
| continues to give support.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Maybe their definition uses recent popularity or how many new
| projects are started with it. Under that definition, I think
| it's pretty safe to call it "dead".
| Rochus wrote:
| If you redefine language, anything is possible.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yes. "Dead" normally means "to be devoid of life," but it's
| often extended to metaphorically cover things like computer
| languages.
|
| edit: for ancient Greek to become a dead language, will we
| be required to burn all of the books that were written in
| it, or can we just settle for not writing any new ones?
| duskwuff wrote:
| No one's starting new projects in COBOL.
| Rochus wrote:
| One of the most significant new COBOL projects in 2025 was
| the integration of a new COBOL front-end into the GNU
| Compiler Collection. There are indeed quite many new projects
| being started in COBOL, though they primarily focus on
| modernization and integration with contemporary technologies
| rather than traditional greenfield development. Also not
| forget some cloud providers now offer "COBOL as a service"
| (see e.g.
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/m2/latest/userguide/what-
| is-m2.h...).
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > There are indeed quite many new projects being started in
| COBOL
|
| No.
|
| You have to put this relative to projects started in other
| languages, at which points new projects started in COBOL is
| even less than a rounding error, it probably wouldn't
| result in anything other than 0 with a float.
| Rochus wrote:
| The claim was " _No one 's starting new projects in
| COBOL._"
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| And everyone of good faith understood what the claim
| actually was.
| Rochus wrote:
| And everyone with relevant fintech project experience
| knows that new projects on the existing core banking
| systems are started all the time and that COBOL continues
| to be a relevant language (whether we like it or not).
| duskwuff wrote:
| By "new COBOL projects" I mean green-field development of
| entirely new projects written in that language - not the
| continued development of existing COBOL codebases, or
| development of tools which interact with COBOL code.
|
| As an aside, the article you linked to is pretty obvious AI
| slop, even aside from the image ("blockchin infarsucture",
| heh). Some of the details, like claims that MIT is offering
| COBOL programming classes or that banks are using COBOL to
| automatically process blockchain loan agreements, appear to
| be entirely fabricated.
| alwinw wrote:
| Interesting read, and would have been good to see the author's
| definition of 'mostly dead'. Some are still used widely in niche
| areas like COBOL for banking. If a language itself isn't
| receiving any updates nor are new packages being developed by
| users, is it mostly dead?
| Rochus wrote:
| In any case, the author claims that each of these languages is
| "dead". There is a "Cause of Death" section for each language,
| which doesn't allow for another conclusion. By listing
| languages like ALGOL, APL, CLU, or Simula, the author implies
| that he means by "dead" "no longer in practical use, or just as
| an academic/historic curiosity". The article contradicts itself
| by listing languages like COBOL, BASIC, PL/I, Smalltalk,
| Pascal, or ML, for which there is still significant practical
| use, even with investments for new features and continuation of
| the language and its applications. The article actually
| disqualifies by listing COBOL or Pascal as "mostly dead",
| because there is still a large market and significant
| investment in these languages (companies such as Microfocus and
| Embarcadero make good money from them). It is misleading and
| unscientific to equate "no longer mainstream" with "no longer
| in use." This makes the article seem arbitrary, poorly
| researched, and the author not credible.
| addaon wrote:
| Seeing Smalltalk on these lists and not Self always seems...
| lacking. Besides its direct influence on Smalltalk, and its
| impact on JIT research, its prototype-based object system lead to
| Javascript's object model as well.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| Self was influenced by Smalltalk, not the other way around.
| Smalltalk was developed in the 1970s. Self in the 1980s.
| addaon wrote:
| Thanks for the correction.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| There is one very _BIG_ thing that Cobol pioneered: the
| requirement that not only the programs, but also the data, must
| be portable across machines. At a time when machines used
| different character codes, let alone different numeric formats,
| Cobol was designed to vastly reduce (though it did not completely
| eliminate) portability woes.
|
| We take this for granted now, but at the time it was
| revolutionary. In part, we've done things like mandating Unicode
| and IEEE 754, but nowadays most of our languages also encourage
| portability. We think very little of moving an application from
| Windows on x86_64 to Linux on ARMv8 (apart from the GUI mess),
| but back when Cobol was being created, you normally threw your
| programs away ("reprogramming") when you went to a new machine.
|
| I haven't used Cobol in anger in 50 years (40 years since I even
| taught it), but for that emphasis on portability, I am very
| grateful.
| froh wrote:
| the other big cobol feature is high precision (i.e. many
| digest) fixed point arithmetic. not loosing pennies on large
| sums, and additionally with well defined arithmetics, portably
| so as you point out, is a killer feature in finance.
|
| you need special custom numerical types to come even close in,
| say, java or C++ or any other language.
| ameliaquining wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22690229
|
| (There are a few other threads with a smaller number of
| comments.)
| mud_dauber wrote:
| Kinda surprised to not see Forth listed.
| drweevil wrote:
| Or Lisp. Lisp is definitely not dead, but was definitely very
| influential.
| tempaway43563 wrote:
| The article does touch on that:
|
| "COBOL was one of the four "mother" languages, along with
| ALGOL, FORTRAN, and LISP."
| bitwize wrote:
| Imho Lisp is deader than COBOL. Especially now that we've
| learned you can do the really hard and interesting bits of AI
| with high-performance number crunching in C++ and CUDA.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Forth was neat, but it was a bit of an evolutionary dead end.
| I'm not aware of any significant concepts from Forth which were
| adopted by other, later programming languages.
| ks2048 wrote:
| PostScript
| tengwar2 wrote:
| RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp, a high level language for HP
| calculators) possibly drew on it a bit, though the main
| antecedents are RPN and Lisp, and possibly Poplog (a Poplog
| guru was at HP at the time, but I don't know if he
| contributed).
| usgroup wrote:
| I was almost sure that Prolog would be on the list, but
| apparently not.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Because it's dead or because it's influential?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| The (literal) first and foremost ASCII descendant of APL was
| MATLAB.
|
| I feel that the article should have made this a lot more clear -
| as so many people code along the APL -> Matlab / R (via S) ->
| NumPy family tree.
| ansgri wrote:
| R/S is also heavily influenced by Lisp. Haven't written it in
| 10 years, but AFAIR it even has proper macros where argument
| expressions are passed without evaluation.
| ck45 wrote:
| Modula-3 should be on that list as well. Unfortunately pretty
| dead (compiler support is rather abysmal), though pretty
| influential. Wikipedia lists a couple of languages that it
| influenced, I think it should also include Go (though Go is
| allegedly influenced by Modula-2, according to its wikipedia
| article)
| asplake wrote:
| What other languages have been influenced by Go?
| jasperry wrote:
| Okay, I'll bite. ML did not mostly die, it morphed into two main
| dialects, SML and OCaml. OCaml is still going strong, and it's
| debatable whether SML is mostly dead.
|
| My main beef, however, is that the last sentence in the section
| seems to suggest that the birth of Haskell killed SML on the vine
| because suddenly everybody only wanted pure, lazy FP. That's just
| wrong. The reality is that these two branches of Functional
| Programming (strict/impure and lazy/pure) have continued to
| evolve together to the present day.
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