Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesfinlayson | Hacker News Reader

> Of the four mother languages, ALGOL is the most "dead"; Everybody still knows about LISP, COBOL still powers tons of legacy systems, and most scientific packages still have some FORTRAN.

I've heard of enough Cobol and Fortran jobs existing, and Lisp continues to exist in some form or other, but Algol really does seem dead. I remember someone telling me about an Algol codebase that was decommissioned in 2005 and that seemed like a very late death for an Algol codebase.

View on HN

> but Algol really does seem dead

Unisys still actively maintains their MCP mainframe operating system, which is written in an Algol superset (ESPOL/NEWP), and comes with a maintained Algol compiler - https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/ClearPath-MCP... - and they continue to add new features to Algol (even if minor)

So, no, Algol isn’t dead. Getting close but still not quite there. There are better candidates for dead languages than Algol, e.g. HAL/S (programming language used for the Space Shuttle flight software)

Ah, coincidentally (or not) the code base in question was running on a Unisys mainframe.

Algol is in the funny position of being both very dead, yet not dead at all given its legacy. I suspect that's sort of inevitable: if all of a language's spirit is cannibalised by newer languages, it will be hard to argue for using the old language and it dies.

(In contrast, Lisp retains some unique ideas that have not been adopted by other languages, so it survives by a slim margin.)

There are several well maintained Common Lisp compilers, some of which are paid for and can sustain whole businesses, Clojure is fairly big as niche languages go, and Guile Scheme is used across GNU projects. There’s also some usage of Racket and Scheme in education, and I believe Janet is having success in gaming. So I wouldn’t say Lisp survives by just a slim margin.

Correct. That was bad wording on my part. I meant it in the sense of "it survives at a scale proportional to the fraction of it that is unique".

It used to be that things like GC, REPL, flexible syntax, the cond form etc. made Lisp unique, but these days the list is down mainly to homoiconicity (and an amazing hacker culture).

the image-based REPL, including the interactive debugger, is still unique (matched maybe by Smalltalk), CLOS and the condition system too… pair them with stability, fast implementations, instantaneous compile-time errors and warnings a keystroke away, a Haskell-like type system on top of the language (Coalton), macros… and the whole is still pretty unique.

There are some legacy programs in DoD that are developed in a variant of Algol 58 called JOVIAL that are still supported and edited despite over 40 years now of mandate to update to something newer (Ada). Also used in some other places, like UK Air Traffic Control at least until 2016 (that was the last date I've seen for replacement plan)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com