[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 | | AFAICT, Scala has basically been replaced by Go for backends and | Kotlin (or just plain Java) elsewhere.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)