[wbl]

This is really a list of the survivors. Tcl was big in the early 1990's, and Objective-C was around on NeXT and other boxes. Perl was rapidly becoming the glue that holds the web together. Lisp was embedded into a lot of programs, as it is now for extensibility. It's also overstating Fortran's role, which is much like todays niche.

It's very hard to have an objective view of what programming language success and popularity looks like over that long a time, but I think that today there is a much narrower happy path. Either you're a dynamically typed multiparadgram language that's mostly imperative and OO in practice (Ruby, Python, Javascript), a statically typed object imperative language with brackets (C#, Go, Java), or Rust (where a lot of people don't realize how good GCs got instead). Not a ton of Haskell or SML inspired new languages.

By contrast in the 1980-1990s there were serious questions about which of Pascal, C, Objective-C, Smalltalk, C++, was going to win out for the dominant language a system is built in. Stuff like Display PostScript depended in a deep way on exposing programing languages to the engineers who had to work with it that were pretty alien.

[igouy]

> Not a ton of Haskell or SML inspired new languages.

"The Rust Reference: Influences" includes SML and Haskell.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html