[farrelle25]

Gosh it's a long time since I heard 'Clipper' mentioned. I used to do 'PC' apps for Banks in the early 90s. Turbo Pascal and Clipper were popular with us. (We used PL/1 rather than COBOL for batch processing)

Then VB 4.0 started to get popular around 1996 and ruled the roost...

So many technologies... does anyone remember 'SUPRA' from that era! (think it was supposed to be a 4GL language/interface for mainframe databases)

[El_RIDO]

Sigh I work at a company that not long ago added support for applications written to use SUPRA to their portfolio. It's not dead yet, there are companies out there still running it in production and willing to spend money to replace it, while keeping their business logic.

[adamc]

Where I work we still use Software AG's Natural for mainframe programming. It's not really a bad language for what it is (very much focused on database programming). The main limitation is that they never created or provided great mechanisms for something like a standard library, so we do a lot in Python now, and occasionally other languages.

From my perspective, the standard libraries of languages like Python and Java, as well as effective package managers such as pip or npm or cargo, have raised the bar so high that it is difficult for old, specialist languages to compete in most cases. Although the security problems of the package managers give me some pause.