Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)

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.

>An accurate analysis of the fall of Pascal would be longer than the rest of this essay.

I put the blame solely on the management of Borland. They had the world leading language, and went off onto C++ and search of "Enterprise" instead of just riding the wave.

When Anders gave the world C#, I knew it was game over for Pascal, and also Windows native code. We'd all have to get used to waiting for compiles again.

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.

"Significance: In terms of syntax and semantics we don’t see much of COBOL in modern computing."

Would I be wrong in saying that SQL has what feels to me to be a very cobaly syntax. By which I mean, I know it is not directly related to cobal, But someone definitely looked at cobal's clunky attempt at natural language and said "that, I want that for my query language"

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.

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)

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....

I was almost sure that Prolog would be on the list, but apparently not.

Dang I wanted it to keep going

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?

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.