
12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off - danw
http://www.softwaredeveloper.com/features/ghosts-in-machine-071207/
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geebee
I wonder if lisp should be included. If delphi and haskell are on the list,
then it seems fair game to rank by relative rather than absolute comparisons
(instead of absolute small numbers, rank by the gap between what is and what
could/should have been). I might also include smalltalk on this list as well.

Oh well - with the web, nothing has to be past tense. Just don't call it a
comeback!

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astocko
LOL @ Willarson's comment

Reading about ColdFusion stirs up feelings of nostalgia for me. I remember
being a young teen interested in web application development and somehow I got
my hands on the Allaire ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit published
by Forta and Que. None the less, that was a short lived experience
(fortunately) and I had quickly moved on to perl.

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willarson
The idea behind this post could be done in an interesting way. It could have
looked at real languages and examined why they--despite some promise--didn't
succeed. Unfortunately thats not what the article did.

Instead it asks us to feign confusion why bitfuck didn't become a mainstream
language. Maybe because it was a bitfucking joke from the start?

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mattculbreth
Heresy! I loved PowerBuilder and I won't have some dude saying it's dead, even
if I haven't seen it in 8+ years.

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mynameishere
Most successful programming language ever? Whitespace:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_>(programming_language)

In fact, we're all programming in it right now, though we'd be getting some
compilation errors.

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Tichy
Maybe brainfuck could be useful for code obfuscation? Just write a small
brainfuck interpreter (should be easy, as it only has 8 commands), then
compile your code to brainfuck.

The 2d language looks like a nice playground for artificial intelligence
experiments (genetic algorithms).

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brlewis
Is it too late for you to change the news.yc title to "12 Coding Languages
That Waned"? It's ridiculous to say that PowerBuilder and ColdFusion never
took off.

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sethg
Even that would be too generous. Brainfuck, Befunge, INTERCAL, and Java2k were
_jokes_ , duh, never intended by their authors to "take off" in the first
place. And I think "never took off" and "waned" are both inaccurate when
applied to Haskell.

I don't know much about VRML, SMIL, and Haskell, but I'm not inclined to trust
this author's judgement of them.

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brlewis
You're right. Haskell, despite having been around a few years, is early in its
life. I suppose the right title would be "12 languages that aren't wildly
popular in 2007."

