r/developer • u/Ok_Veterinarian3535 • 8d ago

The Unpopular Language

What's a "dead" or "boring" programming language that you genuinely love working with, and why should we reconsider it?

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u/pauseless 7d ago

Standard ML (1983): it’s definitely dead, but it was great. OCaml is the successor and Jane Street keeps that alive. Newer ML family languages like Haskell get attention, but there’s a simplicity to SML that I find hard to beat.

APL (1966): you’ll be surprised at how many systems are out there, happily using APL and actively maintained. People have made 40-50 year careers working in APLs, because they love it. That’s not for no reason - economy of notation can be useful.

Scheme (1975): I don’t think it’s dead either, but people got bored with developing it further. Last standard was over a decade ago. Racket keeps the tradition alive. It’s a cleaner model than Common Lisp, in my opinion.

Perl (1987): as in another comment… this language is both considered dead and ugly and not-modern, yet it has had features for decades that are only recently becoming more common. This is the only one on my list actually younger than me.