Which of the 10 Nearly‑Dead Programming Languages Still Shape Modern Tech?

COBOL (1960)

Background: Developed by CODASYL for the US Department of Defense to unify commercial programming.

Significance : First language to introduce structured record data, enabling hierarchical records and named fields, a foundation for modern structs and record types.

Decline : Large, verbose syntax and heavyweight compilers lagged on micro‑computers; academic research ignored it, limiting inheritance of its design ideas. It remains in legacy systems but no longer drives new language design.

ALGOL (1960)

Although little known today, ALGOL is arguably the most “dead” of the four foundational languages.

Significance : Introduced lexical scoping, structured programming, nested functions, BNF syntax, and name‑based calling semantics—essentially the blueprint for modern language design.

Decline : Lacked a standard I/O interface, making practical use difficult; extensions spawned many successors (CPL, BCPL, SIMULA, Pascal, JOVIAL) that eclipsed it, and later attempts like ALGOL 68 lost design cohesion.

APL (1962)

Known for its alien‑like symbols, APL was originally a mathematical notation later turned by IBM into an array‑oriented language.

Significance : Whole‑array operations without explicit loops, enabling one‑line matrix transformations; this model directly inspired R, MATLAB, NumPy, and Pandas.

Decline : Required a special keyboard for its symbols, limiting adoption; poor handling of mixed string‑numeric data further restricted its use, though its descendants (J, K, Q) survive in finance.

BASIC (1964)

Designed to popularize computing, BASIC fit into the limited memory of early micro‑computers.

Significance : Supported large‑scale interpreted execution and real‑time time‑sharing, fostering interactive computing culture.

Decline : Gained a reputation as an amateur language; as memory constraints eased, developers migrated to Pascal and C, and BASIC became associated with beginners.

PL/I (1966)

IBM attempted to unify FORTRAN and COBOL with PL/I, creating a massive, feature‑rich superset.

Significance : Introduced native structured data types, pointers, constants, and function overloading; many of these features later appeared in C.

Decline : Overly complex, perceived as too commercial by FORTRAN users and too scientific by COBOL users; IBM’s control of the compiler ecosystem raised vendor‑lock concerns.

SIMULA 67 (1967)

Built on ALGOL, SIMULA added simulation capabilities and introduced classes, subclasses, virtual methods, and protected attributes.

Significance : Laid the groundwork for object‑oriented programming; its concepts influenced C++ and academic OOP research.

Decline : Poor performance made it unsuitable for production use; later languages adopted its ideas while discarding its inefficiencies.

Pascal (1970)

Created by Niklaus Wirth to retain ALGOL‑60’s elegance while avoiding ALGOL‑68’s complexity.

Significance : Popularized structured programming in education; its syntax became known as the “Pascal style,” influencing Modula, Oberon, and modular design.

Decline : Lost ground to C in the commercial arena; however, Delphi shows it never fully vanished.

CLU (1975)

Barbara Liskov created CLU to study abstract data types.

Significance : Introduced iterators, generics, checked exceptions, and abstract data types; heavily cited by many 1980s language specifications.

Decline : Intended as a research and demonstration language rather than an industrial product, and it fulfilled that purpose.

ML (1976)

Originally built to support theorem proving, not as a mainstream language.

Significance : Pioneered type inference, algebraic data types, and module systems; its innovations are core to modern functional languages.

Decline : Remained academic, later eclipsed by Haskell; its ecosystem did not survive despite widespread adoption of its type‑inference ideas.

Smalltalk (1972–1980)

While not the originator of OOP, Smalltalk introduced the “everything is an object” paradigm.

Significance : Popularized object‑oriented concepts culturally; heavily influenced C++, Objective‑C, Ruby, and distributed object systems.

Decline : Performance bottlenecks and limited interoperability prevented commercial adoption; C++ offered a more efficient OOP implementation.

Overall Insight

Evaluating languages solely by current hiring demand ignores the deep technical lineage that underpins modern software: block structures from ALGOL, type systems from PL/I, abstract data concepts from CLU, type inference from ML, object models from SIMULA, and vectorized computation from APL.

Languages may die, but their ideas endure.