[cctalk] Re: What constitutes a dead computer language

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 < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: