[rodw]

Note that Lisp, COBOL, Fortran and Algol were all invented more then 50 years ago (incidently, 3 of the 4 are still moderately common).

A programmer working in the 1970s or 1980s could easily have a child 20 to 30 years old now. I can't readily find the BLS Handbook of labor Statistics from the period online, but there must have been quite a few of them/us by the mid-1980s.

[dkersten]

incidently, 3 of the 4 are still moderately common

I assume you're talking about Algol as the one not in moderately common. But the lisps, cobol and fortran in use today generally isn't the same as 50 years ago (maaaybe legacy cobol/fortran stuff is?) - especially the lisps used today (mostly common lisp, scheme and new lisps like clojure) are very different from what they were 50 years ago to the degree that they are really entirely different languages. I'd go so far as to say that lisp is not moderately common anymore, but that languages called Scheme, Common Lisp, Clojure etc are. Saying that Lisp is still moderately common due to these languages is no different than saying that Algol is still moderately common - or rather, Algol dialects known as C, Ada, Java, C# and so on are.

[rodw]

"I don’t know what language engineers will use in the future, but I know they’ll call it Fortran."

(A famous quote, but a quick Google doesn't yield a definitive attribution for it.)

Yes, Algol was what I meant as the odd one out. Your point is well taken, although I think this implies more that Algol is among the living than that modern Lisp/COBOL/Fortran are completely divorced from their first-generation ancestry. (To be clear, I read your comment as agreeing with me here, I'm just highlighting the distinction.)

[dkersten]

Yes, I wasn't really disagreeing, but it irks me a bit how a lot of people talk about languages (usually Lisp) as if it were the exact same language that was created 60 years ago that's in use today despite that they have evolved significantly over time and yet the Algol-derived languages are treated completely independently as entirely new entities altogether. Someone mentioned this on HN a day or two ago too.

It would be wrong to say that Lisp/COBOL/Fortran are divorced from their first-generation ancestry. I think a lot of people talk about Lisp as if its still the same language because on the surface it looks like that way: the syntax is mostly still intact and the core values (conses, lists, homoiconicity, macros) are all still these, yet Scheme is still a different beast from Common Lisp, Clojure, Emacs Lisp and what Zeta Lisp was. Algol-derived languages, since they have much more complex syntax than s-expressions, have much more varied syntax and therefore look like very different languages, though they still have a lot of semantics in common with algol.

So I think what I'm saying is (at Least for Lisp and Algol - I don't know enough about COBOL and Fortran to know how different they now are from 50 years ago) in neither of these cases are the languages in use today the same languages that were in use 50 years ago, but that both families of languages have descendants in common use today which can be clearly traced to their first-generation ancestry.