On Tue, 2026-06-16 at 21:11 -0500, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: > For obscure languages APL, LISP, Prolog, ADA, Occam & Pilot come to > mind. Focal, though widely used on DEC computers seems to have died > with the demise of DEC itself.
When the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn was being planned at JPL, they were hoping to use NS16032 or NS32032. Sandia kept promising to deliver a rad-hard version, but never did. Then, out of the blue, DoD and CIA etc suddenly declassified about a dozen quite good rad-hard processors. Their reasoning was "everybody knows about these anyway" — except apparently JPL. The JPL engineers looked at the specs, bought processors, made computers, and threw them over the wall to the programmers — who discovered the only programming environment available was Ada. They were hopping mad because they had their teeth all set to write all the flight software in C++. Then the Ada compiler started finding bugs that a C++ compiler would never have caught, and most of them would be mission-killers. As with most religions, the most recently converted adherents become the most vocal evangelists.
