alt Hacker NewsI wrote something similar here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/blog/GroundBreakingLanguages.html
We agree on Algol, Lisp, Forth, APL, and Prolog. For ground-breaking functional language, I have SASL (St Andrews Static Language), which (just) predates ML, and for object oriented language, I have Smalltalk (which predates Self).
I also include Fortran, COBOL, SNOBOL (string processing), and Prograph (visual dataflow), which were similarly ground-breaking in different ways.
Replies
f1shy • yesterday at 4:45 PM
I don’t understand why self is placed in the list instead of smalltalk. Smalltalk came first, and Alan Key was the one who invented the “OOP” name.
Also ML is seen as a child of Lisp.
➕ show 1 reply
I like your list better, mostly because of the inclusion of SNOBOL, which I never used, but was one of the first programming languages I read about as a young child after a book about it caught my attention at a public library book sale because of the funny name.
The only languages I was familiar with before this were BASIC, Logo, and a bit of 6502 assembly, though I had only used the latter by hand-assembly and calling it from BASIC following an example in the Atari BASIC manual[1].
Also, it's hard for me to imagine how anyone could make a list of ground-breaking programming languages that doesn't include Fortran and COBOL (or FLOW-MATIC as the source of many of its innovations).
[1] https://archive.org/details/atari-basic-reference-manual/pag...