Hacker News Reader

Comment by xhrpost | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia > "Ada was originally designed by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD at that time."

Wow, it is mind blowing to me that 450 different programming languages existed in the late 70's. Do we know what most of these were? Do most exist today or have they been lost to time?

View on HN

Many were variants or specific implementations of other languages (like Algol), or assembly languages for numerous machines. Remember, this was pre-Internet. A lot of languages were developed because an office needed them for a specific application. Or they knew the theory (enough at least) of a language but didn't have an implementation for their hardware or OS, so they made a new one if they couldn't purchase one. And when you develop the language in tandem with the application, you end up with something custom and non-portable (or hard to port).

This still lives in mainframes to some extent: every mainframe has its own programming language due to differences in hardware and software and legacy.

According to an amazon reviewer [1], Sammet's book Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals (from 1969) already discusses ~120 different languages! And gives code examples in 30 of them.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Languages-Fundamentals-Au...

Plenty of them were variations of Algol, PL/I and Lisp, including for systems programming.

Some surviving ones are NEWP and PL/S, if you happen to touch an IBM or Unisys mainframe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com