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by jdrek1 253 days ago
I would guess that Ada is simply more known. Keep in mind that tech exploded in the past ~3.5 decades whereas those languages are much older and lost the popularity contest. If you ask most people about older languages, the replies other than the obvious C and (kind of wrong but well) C++ are getting thin really quickly. COBOL, Ada, Fortran, and Lisp are probably what people are aware of the most, but other than that?
1 comments
wpollock 253 days ago
You've forgotten about BASIC, SNOBOL, APL, Forth, and PL/1. There were many interesting programming languages back then. Good times!
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aworks 253 days ago
The first five languages I learned back in the 70s: FORTRAN, Pascal, PL/I, SNOBOL, APL. Then I was an Ada and Icon programmer in the 80s. In the 90s, it was C/C++ and I just never had the enthusiasm for it.
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dreamcompiler 252 days ago
Icon (which came from SNOBOL) is one of the few programming languages I consider to embody truly new ideas. (Lisp, Forth, and Prolog are others that come to mind.)

Icon is an amazing language and I wish it was better known.

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failingforward 252 days ago
You probably know this but, for anyone else who is interested, the easiest way to get a feel for Icon nowadays may be through its descendant Unicon which is available at unicon.org.
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aworks 245 days ago
thanks for the reminder. will give it another try.
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prerok 253 days ago
I found Pascal more readable as a budding programmer. Later on, C's ability to just get out of the way to program what I wanted trumped the Pascal's verbosity and opinionatedness.

I admit that the terseness of the syntax of C can be off-putting. Still, it's just syntax, I am sorry you were disuaded by it.

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fuzztester 253 days ago
True.

I dabbled in some of them during some periods when I took a break from work. And also some, during work, in my free time at home.

Pike, ElastiC (not a typo), Icon, Rebol (and later Red), Forth, Lisp, and a few others that I don't remember now.

Not all of those are from the same period, either.

Heck, I can even include Python and Ruby in the list, because I started using them (at different times, with Python being first) much before they became popular.

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