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.
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?
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22690229
(There are a few other threads with a smaller number of comments.)
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.
Self was influenced by Smalltalk, not the other way around. Smalltalk was developed in the 1970s. Self in the 1980s.
Thanks for the correction.
Kinda surprised to not see Forth listed.
Or Lisp. Lisp is definitely not dead, but was definitely very influential.