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Comment by megla_ | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely haven't heard of 13 of those and I'd say I'm quite interested in learning about languages. The few that I know, were just briefly mentioned by a professor, so I don't know anything apart from the name.

What qualifies as prominent to you? How old are you? On Tiobe Index only Pascal and Go are in the first 50, while half of them aren't even listed in the first 100. Sure they're important and had an impact on new languages, but most of them were made ~50 years ago.

So many new languages were developed since then, which are far more useful and prominent than these legacy ones. If almost none of the modern ones have implemented it so far, is it really that useful/needed?

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>I genuinely haven't heard of at least a third of them and I'd say I'm quite interested in trying new (and possibly unusual) languages.

But perhaps not as interested in trying old and significant languages?

>What qualifies as prominent to you? On Tiobe Index only Pascal and Go are in the first 50, while half of them aren't even listed in the first 100. Sure they're important and had an impact on new languages, but most of them were made ~50 years ago.

Well, Lisp was made 60+ years ago, and C 50 years ago, so?

Besides Go, Smalltalk, Ada, and Pascal would be significant languages in any book, and I'd add Simula, Oberon, Eiffel, and Dylan to the list.

Seriously, if one haven't at least heard of Simula (the father language of OO) I'm not sure how qualified they are to pass PL judgement.

>Well, Lisp was made 60+ years ago, and C 50 years ago, so?

Well, they're still seeing widespread use, that's why they're on Tiobe, while others faded into obscurity. Those languages are historically significant, but nowadays they're basically useless apart from scientific use and maintaning old software.

Maybe you should understand that the majority of programmers are younger than Python and don't study the same material they did 30 years ago, because a whole lot of history happened in that time. Also I'm not sure how not knowing about Simula makes me unqualified for anything.

I've noticed, not just in this reply, but in all of your comments; your condescending tone and indirect addressing make you seem like an unpleasant person.

Using these qualities makes one seem like some stuck-up pseudointellectual boomer.

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