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The Most Important Obscure Languages?

Posted by samzenpus on from the never-heard-of-it dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: If you're a programmer, you're knowledgeable about "big" languages such as Java and C++. But what about those little-known languages you only hear about occasionally? Which ones have an impact on the world that belies their obscurity? Erlang (used in high-performance, parallel systems) springs immediately to mind, as does R, which is relied upon my mathematicians and analysts to crunch all sorts of data. But surely there are a handful of others, used only by a subset of people, that nonetheless inform large and important platforms that lots of people rely upon... without realizing what they owe to a language that few have ever heard of.

3 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. Intercal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://catb.org/esr/intercal/

    It speaks for itself...

  2. VBA by alexhs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Visual Basic for Applications seems to be a pretty important language on the dark side of the Force.

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  3. This one's easy by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Funny

    French.

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