The Most Important Obscure Languages?

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.

Comments

I would hardly call R obscure.

[BitterOak]

Just because a language was built for specialized uses doesn't mean it's obscure. R is very widely known and used. I haven't used Erlang, but I've heard of it, which means it probably isn't too obscure.

Does Ada count as 'little known'?

[david.emery]

Most contemporary aircraft have significant amounts of flight-critical software in Ada, some train control systems use Ada, some air traffic control systems use Ada, and of course there's a lot of Ada in US (and other country's) weapon systems. There's the SPARK subset that has been used for provably correct systems (does your software vendor provide a no-bugs warranty?). And there's production-quality code available under Open Source. http://www.adacore.com/ (no connection with AdaCore, other than I have lots of friends who work there.) All of my production code after 1980 was written in Ada. There's substantial anecdotal/unpublished evidence that shows large Ada systems have substantially lower life-cycle/software maintenance costs. Your Mileage May Vary, of course.

MUMPS

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

This unholy abomination is often tied into your healthcare systems. At the minimum, modern health care software has to be able to speak it to communicate to the old iron still used by hospitals. Often times, you'll still see the software designed in it. The best thing about it is the compactness of the code, which hearkened back to the day when 640kb of memory was all anyone needed. It compressed so much and encouraged such short variable length that mentally unwinding code is extremely difficult, especially when those variables are functionally database queries.

JCL

[roman_mir]

Job Control Language.

Re:3 categories: general-purpose; specialist; hips

[Anonymous Coward]

For the avoidance of doubt, Go, Dart, Swift and Rust are top tier hipster, and a kitten masturbates god every time someone writes their first Hello World in any of them.

Ruby is so obviously hipster that not even hipsters think it's cool anymore.

Every language developed in the past 15 years which promises AMAZINGLY EASY PARALLEL PROGRAMMING OPPORTUNITIES is hipster. Pro-tip: parallel programming is hard, and an excellent understanding of just what the fuck you're doing is what'll give you efficient, bug-free code - not syntactic sugar.

C and Perl are the quintessential general-purpose languages.

Python is arguably hipster-LISP.

PHP was special-purpose in the days where it was that or cgi-perl, but I'm not sure what the fuck PHP is now. It still feels like BASIC but for web programmers.

Javascript is a great bit of general-purpose quick-and-dirty, but most Javascript libraries make it hipster. jQuery in particular is a great example of how it doesn't matter one fucking bit how incompetent software developers are because Intel makes some really fucking fast CPUs these days. This is really annoying, as the base language is just not-awful enough to be good.

C++, hands down

[DoofusOfDeath]

I use C++ all day, every day. Every time the C++ standardization committee meets, the language gets more obscure to me.

Re:The one true language

[Garfong]

I find being able to read assembly incredibly useful when debugging optimized C/C++ code. In my experience it's not infrequent for a debugger to not be able to find the value of a variable in memory, even on lines where the variable is being passed into a (non-inline) function.

And debugging optimized code is required a fair amount when fixing performance & reliability issues (when the problem may disappear on non-optimized code), and embedded (where the program may not fit on the device without optimization).

Re:3 categories: general-purpose; specialist; hips

[Required Snark]

You opinions may or may not be valid. I won't argue about any particular judgement.

Your attitude sucks rocks. Your use of the word "hipster" as a pejorative is asinine. It demonstrates that you have the emotional maturity of an eight year old.

To show just how puerile you are, I will demonstrate by substituting "cooties" for "hipster" in part of your post.

For the avoidance of doubt, Go, Dart, Swift and Rust have top tier cooties, and a kitten masturbates god every time someone writes their first Hello World in any of them.

Ruby is so obviously has cooties that not even cooties think it's cool anymore.

Every language developed in the past 15 years which promises AMAZINGLY EASY PARALLEL PROGRAMMING OPPORTUNITIES has cooties.

Since there are no standards on Slashdot it makes no difference when you post drivel like this. If you were to ever display this kind of behavior in a school or professional environment you would be lucky to last a week.

Get a clue. Grow up. Otherwise you are a waste of space.