alt Hacker NewsReminds me a bit of Bruce Tate’s approach in 7 languages in 7 weeks, which is where I first encountered Erlang.
I think from a historical perspective, describing COBOL and Fortran as part of the ALGOL family is a stretch, but I suppose it’s a good reminder that all history is reductive.
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I also think going back farther is a stretch. The first assembly languages were imperative, but what made Algol, Fortran, and Cobol interesting were functions and other features that allowed complex programming. Algol has the most descendants but Fortran was the first imperative programming language.
Does anybody know whether Fortran is older or younger than Algol? From Wikipedia, it looks like they were both developed around 1957. Was there any overlap in the design?
Rather COBOL is a living fossil? And today's Fortran is the FORTRAN family with horizontal gene transfer from the Algol lineage of programming languages.
There's also (besides Tate's sequel of 7 more languages), Dimitry Zinoviev's 7 Obscure Languahes in Seven Weeks. I liked it a lot, even if it hurt my feelings a bit to have my beloved Forth be one of the obscure languages (the others were APL, SNOBOL, Occam, Simula, Starset, and M4) -- I'm old and nerdy, but hadn't even heard of Occam and Starset.