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Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)
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.
Of the four mother languages, ALGOL is the most “dead”; Everybody still knows about LISP, COBOL still powers tons of legacy systems, and most scientific packages still have some FORTRAN. To assist in writing the proofs, Milner created a metalanguage based on sound mathematical formalisms, which at the time meant strict static types and higher-order functions. I didn’t cover ALPHARD, ALTRAN, Argus, Automath, BCPL, COMTRAN, CPL, Eiffel, FLOW-MATIC, HOPE, Hypercard, ISWIM, JOVIAL, MacSyma, Mesa, Miranda, Multics Shell, PLANNER, SMP, Sketchpad, or SNOBOL.
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