Perl — not dead, dying. CPAN still spins, sysadmins still sin. Faint but unmistakable odor. Tcl — embalmed alive inside EDA toolchains and test harnesses. Nobody starts here; nobody can leave. Delphi / Object Pascal — Embarcadero still invoices for it, Lazarus/FPC keep the open flame. Niche, breathing. Smalltalk — Pharo and Squeak are a real congregation, just a small one chanting in an empty cathedral. Forth — firmware hermits and Open Firmware legacy. Tiny, devout, weirdly immortal. APL — Dyalog quietly bills finance and actuaries. Alive the way a glyph-cult is alive. (J: either more or less dead,???) Prolog — SWI keeps it taught and occasionally deployed. Logic's persistent vegetative state. Objective-C — actively being smothered by Swift, but mountains of it still compile and ship. A loud, slow death. Eiffel — design-by-contract's last holdout. Near-flatline, monitor beeping every few seconds. Visual Basic 6 — Microsoft killed the patient; the corpse runs half the back offices in America. ColdFusion — Adobe still cuts releases, which is the only thing distinguishing it from a séance. ActionScript — entombed with Flash in December 2020. Recent enough the flowers haven't wilted. PL/I — IBM's everything-bagel of a language, now reduced to shrinking mainframe crumbs. Modula-2 / Oberon — Wirth's later orderly children, both essentially hobbyist embers now. Logo — gone, but the turtle gave it name-recognition immortality. Famous-dead. HyperTalk — died with HyperCard and is mourned, which is more than most get. Classic BASIC (GW/QBasic, line numbers) — the line-numbered form is a fossil with enormous name recognition. 10 GOTO heaven. SNOBOL — Griswold's string-mangling legend. Dead, and the patterns went with it. Icon — SNOBOL's sequel; its goal-directed generators live on only as Python's DNA. CLU — Liskov's. Iterators (yield!), exceptions, parametric types — its organs were harvested into every modern language while the body rotted. Mesa / Cedar — Xerox PARC's systems tongue. Ran the Star, fathered Modula-2, then vanished with the building's mythology. PL/M — Kildall's. CP/M's mother language. Dead as the platform it bootstrapped. BLISS — DEC's expression-oriented systems language. Built VMS utilities, then nothing. Occam — transputer-and-CSP, channels and PAR. Concurrency done right, killed by the hardware dying under it. JOVIAL — "Jules' Own Version of the IAL." Still twitches in some avionics maintenance, but that's life support, not life. Simula — the ur-vater of OOP. Classes, objects, virtual methods, coroutines — all born here, and nobody runs it. The deadest important language there is. Algol 60 — the grammar of everything, spoken by no one. A dead Latin that every living Romance language descends from. Algol 68 — your example. Zero users, one ghost (Bourne). BCPL → B — Richards' typeless ancestor, Thompson's middle child, both consumed whole by C. Lineage alive, languages embalmed. Miranda — Turner's lazy-pure functional language, killed by its own proprietary license — which is precisely why the open committee built Haskell on its grave. SETL — set theory as primitives; the first Ada compiler was written in it. Influenced ABC, hence Python. Utterly gone. Sather — named for Berkeley's tower as a sly dig at the Eiffel Tower. The joke outlived the language. Alphard — Barely implemented, mostly proof obligations. Stillborn-adjacent. FLOW-MATIC — Hopper's English-like ancestor of COBOL. The mother died; the daughter, infuriatingly, won't. Plankalkül — Zuse, ~1945, designed in a bombed-out Germany and not implemented until 2000. The deadest of all: it arrived at the cemetery before it ever drew breath.
On Wed, Jun 17, 2026 at 7:52 AM Bill Gunshannon via cctalk < [email protected]> wrote: > > > On 6/17/2026 9:43 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > > > > > >> On Jun 16, 2026, at 10:31 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> > >> I'm sure there are more "dead" computer languages than there are living > ones. > >> > >> However, what is the definition of a dead computer language. Here are > a few potential definitions (choose one or more or add your own): > >> > >> * If the language is not running, as an interpreter or compiler, on > >> any currently manufactured computer. Running on antique computers > >> or simulators doesn't count. > >> * If no one is being paid to program in that language or maintain code > >> in that language. > >> * If the standards for the language have not been updated in more than > >> 10 (25, 50) years. > >> * If the language is no longer being used in a production/commercial > >> environment. > >> * If the language is only being used in the > >> hobbyist/historian/antique/simulation environments. > >> > >> Here is an example question: There is an in production add on to an > antique computer written and being supported in Forth. The Forth > interpreter/compiler is running on a modern ARM based micro. Even though > the target of the product is an antique computer since it is using a > current technology micro with a supported forth, I would say that Forth is > not a dead language. > >> > >> Here is a list of languages from my past, how many of them are > officially dead by one or more of the above definitions? > >> > >> APL > >> Forth > > > > Definitely alive. See Zeptoforth, for current ARM microcontrollers. > > > >> Lisp > > > > Obviouslly alive, given that millions use emacs which uses a LISP > dialect. > > > >> Algol > > > > 60 or 68? Are Univac/Burroughs machines still around in production? If > so, 60 is alive. And Algol 68 runs on current machines, via GCC. > > > >> Dibol > >> Focal > >> Occam > >> Prolog > >> Watfor & Watfive > > > > It's WATFIV. And those are FORTRAN implementations, not languages in > their own right. > > > >> Ratfor > >> Flap > >> Ralf > >> Teco (editor and macro language) > > > > I don't use it a lot, but I stil run it on my Mac from time to time when > I need to do some magic that it does more easily (for me) than emacs. > > > >> Pilot > >> DB2 > >> Foxbase > >> Any of the Hp Calculator languages (RPL, HP-41 User code) > >> I'm sure their are dead dialects of BASIC but BASIC is currently > supported as Visual Basic and Dartmouth Basic. > >> > >> Please update this list as to whether any of these languages are dead > (by the current definition above) or alive. Also, please add new > definitions and languages that are dead or nearly dead. > >> > >> Note: Dead dialects of a living language don't count. > > > > Some other older languages: > > SNOBOL > > SYMPL > > CYBIL > > Tutor (probably not alive by your definition but alive surprisingly > recently) > > PL/I > > POP-2 > > Hmmm... Does having current examples posted to Rosetta Code constitute > modern use? :-) All of mine are either compiled or interpreted and > tested before posting. > > bill > >
