5 programming languages that existed before Python and Java became popular
The programming landscape has completely transformed since the early 2000s. Individual processors now have more than one core, and more computing machines are launching with multiple processors. This transition in computing infrastructure necessitated the creation of programming languages that could fully use the new processor architecture. However, among these developing programming languages, there are some forgotten programming languages that once ruled the coding and programming world. However, they have fallen out of favour due to the rise of the trendy and modern languages now. Let’s take a look at them.
Cobol
Cobol came into being during the divide between business and science in computers in early 2000s. High-level industry languages were employed at the time for either engineering computations or data management. Cobol, along with Algol, Fortran, and Lisp, was once one of the mother languages which is out of favour now. However, it is still used in a number of legacy business systems.
Algol
Algol is a family of imperative computer programming languages that influence a number of others. Imperative programming languages tell the computer how to accomplish a particular task. Algol was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for more than 30 years, and it was used in textbooks and academic publications too. It was, however, a research language, not a commercial one. It was created for the purpose of studying algorithms. As a result, it lost popularity with the advent of modern programming languages.
APL
APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed by Canadian computer scientist, Kenneth E Iverson in the 1960s. It is an old programming language with a multidimensional array as its core datatype. Most functions and operators were represented by a huge number of specific graphic symbols, resulting in extremely succinct code. APL influenced the development of concept modelling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages significantly.
Erlang
Erlang is well renowned for its concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance features. It rose to prominence in the telecommunications industry, and then expanded its reach into banking and e-commerce, among other areas. However, its popularity has dwindled in recent years due to its steep learning curve and the availability of better options.
Haskell
Haskell is one of the earliest statistically typed general-purpose programming languages, designed primarily for symbolic calculations and processing applications. It is mostly used in industrial and research applications. Although Haskell is still used by researchers in several academic fields, the popularity of Python and Go programming languages has surpassed Haskell in recent years.
Perl
Perl began as a scripting language for Unix system administration duties in the 1980s. Since then, it has grown in popularity as a general-purpose computer language. Perl's application in critical IT disciplines like data science and analytics is currently consistent.