alt Hacker NewsLisp, Forth, Erlang, Smalltalk, and Rebol, so easily forgotten.
All languages that multiply your insight into the nature of computer programming. A bit sad that many just stop at the first of these, and many more don’t even venture past their Pythons and Javascripts.
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And that's completely natural. Compare it with woodworking.
Yes, some people would dive deep into the craft and create works of art, exquisite furniture and tools they need to make it even better.
But those are the few. For the most of woodworkers this is just something they somehow learned to do on a level needed to be able to get a job and make living.
I find that lamentation a bit funny, because the list in practice is never really complete. For instance, you forgot the mighty Prolog. Surely, tcl belongs on there too.
Wouldn't you just do elixir now? It's like erlang but even wilder.
I think smalltalk and erlang are so interesting because they model the idea of small computers so differently.
Lisp just feels like the purest way to understand what the units of a programming language really is.
Favorited and commenting on this so I can get back to this :)
My version of that list, in no particular order: Smalltalk, Haskell, C, Lisp, Prolog, Forth.
No love for APL?
Lisp is not "forgotten". It's quite alive, kicking and running [big] circles.
Nubank (the largest digital bank in the world) using Clojure as their primary driver grew from ~12M customers in 2019 to 131M in 2025 - almost 1000% growth in less than a decade. JPMorgan that has about 80M customers took around 150 years and dozens of acquisitions.
Apple, Walmart, Netflix, Cisco, Amazon - they all use Clojure. Google and Grammarly use Common Lisp.
Check the GitHub language stats and be surprised to see Emacs Lisp among the visible top. There's so much Elisp on GitHub alone - it's just effing crazy. That fact alone at least should be surprising. Remember? This is a not a general-purpose language - it's made for one and only thing, tis a damn configuration language for a text editor. And no, it isn't "some old stuff", check r/emacs - new packages get announced daily! I'm not even exaggerating - new stuff for Emacs comes every single day. Who the heck are all these psychos? Have they not realized how "forgotten" and "dead" Lisp was?
Seriously though, Lisp dialects are enormously practical, it is inconceivable today to find a runtime where you just can't run stuff built with a Lisp. And Lispers keep adding more - Janet, Jank, Jolt, Fennel, Clojure-Dart, Cljbang, Squint - all are pretty young, yet already not some "useless toys" - they're used to build real stuff.