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

Intercal

[Anonymous Coward]

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

It speaks for itself...

VBA

[alexhs]

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

Re:I would hardly call R obscure.

[LWATCDR]

So what is and not obscure?
ADA? It is used in all the latest Boeing airliners but not used a lot outside of the aerospace community.
What about Lisp?
Or Haskell?
What about Comal, Action! and Promal? Now those are obscure.
Pascal ,Modual, Oberon?
Or the RPG family? REXX?
Some are truly obscure or just not used anymore and some are very common in a specific domain. For instance I have never needed to use Lua but I know it is used in a lot of places.

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 There's substantial anecdotal/unpublished evidence that shows large Ada systems have substantially lower life-cycle/software maintenance costs.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.

Re:Does Ada count as 'little known'?

[grimmjeeper]

I would say that since the FAA dropped the Ada mandate near on 20 years ago, there are few to no new projects being developed in Ada. As a former Ada programmer who has worked on avionics systems, the only jobs I see out there are for maintenance and upgrading of legacy software. Every new avionics project I've seen is done in C or in some cases, C++, depending on whether or not they went to the trouble of getting C++ accepted by risk-averse project management.

I've spent a career in the safety critical world, both in military and defense. Coincidentally, I did a short stint in train control as well. I haven't written a line of Ada code since 1998 and it's becoming increasingly rare to see any project still written in Ada. I have not even heard of any train control systems being written in Ada (though that doesn't mean there aren't). All of the new Positive Train Control upgrades being added to train systems are all written in C/C++. That much I can say for certain.

While Ada has some useful features, I found it was more than a bit tedious and cumbersome to use day to day. And while the development environment is solid and bug free, it doesn't get around the fact that bad programmers write bad code in any language. Sure, Ada puts road blocks in front of you but bad programmers are adept at getting around them with surprising frequency. That's not to say bad programmers writing bad code is exclusive to Ada. Bad programmers write bad code in any language. But the whole notion that a language can "prevent" bugs is ludicrous. The best it does is to "help you avoid" bugs. But adherence to a quality coding standard, along with competent people performing code reviews will do that for you no matter what language you use.

In this day and age, Ada certainly qualifies as "little known" because it is a dying language that most young people are never exposed to. It is slowly being displaced by more ubiquitous languages. Sure, there are some passionate adherents who will keep it alive for decades to come. But it will linger on only in a few niche environments, slowly fading into history.

This one's easy

[93 Escort Wagon]

French.

LISP

[Ckwop]

LISP is probably the most powerful language every discovered. I say "discovered" here and not "created" deliberately. There is a quality about it that makes it feel more like an extension of mathematics rather than a language.

It might have conquered the world if only Eich had been allowed to build Scheme in the browser, as he was hired to do.

Instead, it languishes for some reason I can't really understand. I still wish for a day it becomes a mainstream language but I think it'll just remain a wish.

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.

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.