Most (ly Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)

Summary

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. Disclaimer: Yeah not all of these are dead and not all of these are forgotten. Like most people have heard of Smalltalk, right? Also there’s probably like a billion mistakes in this, because when you’re doing a survey of 60 years of computing history you’re gonna get some things wrong. Feel free to yell at me if you see anything! Disclaimer 2: Yeah I know some of these are “first to invent” and others are “first to popularize”. History is complicated! Detecting Influence Before we start, a quick primer on finding influence. Just knowing that X was the first language with feature Z doesn’t mean that X actually influenced Z. While Absys was arguably the first logic programming language, almost all of logic programming actually stems from Prolog, which was developed independently. Ultimately there’s only one way to know for certain that X influenced Y: citation. This means one of Y cites X in its reference manual Y cites a paper that cites X The author of Y says “we were influenced by X.” Citations are transitive. Sometimes the language manual for Q lists motivating document R, which cites paper S as an inspiration, which mentions it got the ideas from language T. Then we know that T influenced Q, even if the chain is several steps long. This means digging through many sources to find a signal. To speed this up we use heuristics to decide where to look. One effective heuristic is programming language cognates. It’s very rare for languages to independently come up with the same syntax. So if two languages share some syntax, one likely influenced...